is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and association with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke.
Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and made his mark with his first photobook Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze. Many of his well-known works from the 1960s and 1970s are read through the lenses of post-war reconstruction and post-Occupation cultural upheaval.
Moriyama continued to experiment with the representative possibilities offered by the camera in his 1969 Accident series, which was serialized over one year in the photo magazine Asahi Camera, in which he deployed his camera as a copying machine to reproduce existing media images. His 1972 photobook Farewell Photography, which was accompanied by an interview with his fellow Provoke photographer Takuma Nakahira, presents his radical effort to dismantle the medium.
Although the photobook is a favored format of presentation among Japanese photographers, Moriyama was particularly prolific: he has produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968. His creative career has been honored by a number of solo exhibitions by major institutions, along with his two-person exhibition with William Klein at Tate Modern in 2012–13. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Hasselblad Award in 2019 and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2012.
Career Early life and career beginnings Moriyama was born in Ikeda, Osaka in 1938 as Hiromichi Moriyama. Owing to his father's work, his family moved frequently, and Moriyama spent parts of his childhood in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Chiba, and Shimane (his paternal family's home prefecture) before returning to Osaka around the age of 11.
From the ages of 16 to 20, he worked in graphic design before pivoting to photography in his early 20s after purchasing an inexpensive Canon IV Sb from a friend. In Osaka, Moriyama worked at the studio of photographer Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to connect with the radical photography collective Vivo, whose work he admired. He eventually found work as an assistant to photographer and Vivo member Eikoh Hosoe, whom he credits with teaching him much of the fundamentals of photographic practice and technique. Yet for the three years he spent working for Hosoe, Moriyama did not take any photographs of his own until Hosoe, out of impatience, urged him to show him some of his own work.
As a young man coming of age in 1950s and '60s, Moriyama bore witness to the political unrest (illustrated most vividly in the 1960 Anpo protests), economic revival and mass consumerism, and radical art-making that characterized the two decades following the end of World War II. His first photobook, Nippon gekijō shashinchō (にっぽん劇場写真帖, Japan: A Photo Theater), published in 1968, captures the excitement, tension, anxiety, and rage of urban life during this critical historical juncture through a collection of images, indiscriminate in subject matter, presented in dizzying succession through full-page spreads. The photographs range from ordinary streetscapes featuring blurred faces and garish signage to snapshots alluding to the aggressive redevelopment taking place in Tokyo and the rubble left in its wake, as well as images of nightlife and darker elements of urban life. As the title of the photobook suggests, Moriyama's approach homes in on the spectacle of everyday life in all its ugliness and splendor.
Provoke (1969–70)
In 1965, a series of photographs of preserved human embryos, titled Mugon geki ("silent theatre", Pantomime), by Moriyama were published in the magazine Gendai no me and caught the attention of avant-garde poet Shūji Terayama. Terayama commissioned Moriyama to provide accompanying images for his experimental theatre and prose works, providing Moriyama with a boost in his early career and connecting him to other avant-garde creatives including Tadanori Yokoo and Takuma Nakahira. His connection to Nakahira, a founding member of the photography magazine Provoke, eventually led to his participation in the publication beginning with the second issue in 1969.
Moriyama is widely recognized for his work associated with the short-lived but deeply influential magazine, which was founded by photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanishi, along with critic Kōji Taki and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968. The publication popularized the "are, bure, boke" style, translated as "grainy/rough, blurry, out-of-focus," an aesthetic rebuttal to the dominant European-style photojournalism style (exemplified by Ken Domon's realist approach) and straightforward commercial work that dominated the Japanese photography scene at the time."For the sake of thought: Provoke, 1968–1970", Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved January 8, 2015. These visions of everyday life rejected the notion that photography captures a lucid reflection of the world undergirded by a legible ideological argument; rather, they sought to emphasize the fragmentary nature of reality and make evident the photographer's prowling, wandering gaze.
Eroticism and masculinized subjectivity are often associated with Moriyama's contributions to the magazine, as evidenced by works such as "Eros" (1969), featured in the second issue of the publication. The grainy, skewed image features a nude woman smoking a cigarette on a hotel bed—suggestive of the aftermath of a tryst. Her back faces the viewer, while her surroundings are shrouded in dense shadows, giving the camera's gaze a furtive and ominous air.
As stated in the magazine's 1968 manifesto, "[T]he images [eizō] themselves are not ideas. They do not possess the wholeness of concepts, neither are they a communicative code like language....But this irreversible materiality [hikagyakuteki bussitsusei] – reality cut off from the camera – constitutes the reverse side of the world defined by language; and for this reason, [the image] is at times able to provoke the world of language and ideas." Provoke sought to assert photography's role in producing a phenomenological encounter that focused on the bodily and the immediate, moving beyond preconceived notions of truth, reality, and vision to probe questions surrounding the identity of photographic matter and the roles of the photographer, subject, and viewer. Though the collective only produced three issues and a book, First, Abandon the World of Pseudocertainty – Thoughts on Photography and Language (1970), each member continued to publicize their work in close relation to the "era of Provoke," and the magazine has had an immense cultural impact and been the subject of numerous international exhibitions.
Akushidento (Accident) (1969) In 1968, Moriyama began producing a series focused on the theme of "equivalence" using images featured in mass media as his source material. According to Moriyama, the series was prompted by an experience he had at a train terminal in Tokyo, whereupon he was shocked to see the news of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination on the front page of newspapers scattered all around him. Taking interest in the mediated nature of press images, Moriyama says in an interview with Nakahira that this encounter prompted him to become "determined to negate the values that are attached to one single photograph." Moriyama photographed images reproduced from different mass media, including a television still of Lyndon B. Johnson announcing the suspension of the bombing of North Vietnam, newswire shots of Richard Nixon shortly after winning the presidential election, and the corpses of brutally killed Vietcong soldiers, along with the aforementioned image of Robert F. Kennedy. Moriyama treated the camera as a device that copies reality and thus produces "equivalents," rendering insignificant the distance that the original photographs, the endlessly reproduced press images, and Moriyama's own versions have from the initial event. The twelve-part series was published in Asahi Camera alongside his own texts, where he describes the unpredictability of fate and the precariousness of human experience, believing that the camera has the capacity to reveal the "possibility of tragedy [that] has somehow seeped into the surrounding environment."
Shashin yo sayōnara (Farewell Photography) (1972) Published in April 1972, Shashin yo sayōnara ("Farewell Photography") emerged within the context of Japan's aggressive cultural and economic revival—best exemplified in the creative sphere by Expo '70—and continued suppression of left-wing politics, as illustrated by the failure of the 1970 Anpo protests and the subsequent renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty. The photobook, as suggested by the title, takes a nihilistic turn from his prior work, turning its attention towards the incidental and evocative nature of photography rather than the visual subject itself. The images highlight the physical detritus of the photographic process, such as the edges of discarded film, flecks of dust, and light leaks, along with the material dimensions of image-making as evidenced through the sprocket holes on negative strips and the brand names of the film, challenging the indexical relationship between photographer, camera, and image and the established conventions of viewing photographs as referents of reality.
Karyūdo (A Hunter) (1972) Inspired by the liberatory and indeterminate qualities of Sal Paradise's journey in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957, first Japanese translation published in 1959), Moriyama borrowed a friend's old Toyota and embarked on a solo road trip across Japan, capturing photographs along the trip that would become the basis for Karyūdo ("A Hunter"), a photobook published in June 1972 as the tenth installment of the series Gendai no me ("The Modern Gaze"). Many of the scenes were captured by Moriyama as he drove past them, made evident by the skewed angles, blurry, moving figures, and fragments of road infrastructure that cut across the picture plane. The title of the volume refers to his "stalker-life" attitude towards observing and capturing his surroundings, through the perspective of a cold, detached, solitary watcher. At the same time, the volume maintains a certain open-endedness in its format, lacking any sort of narrative resolution that might typically accompany the trope of a road trip or a hunting excursion, and instead putting forth a sensation of perpetual anxiety and uncertainty through its succession of consistently detached and irresolvable images of subjects and scenes across Japan.
The book contains some of Moriyama's best-known images, including "Stray Dog, Misawa, 1971", which depicts a growling, haggard dog turning its head towards the camera. The image was taken in Misawa, Aomori prefecture, where a large US Air Force base is located (Moriyama shot at other U.S. military bases throughout his career, including at the naval base in Yokosuka.) The introduction of the book was written by pop artist and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, who wrote of Moriyama's pictures as being akin to "someone who talks, without looking people in the eye." The book was re-released in 2011 with the addition of new commentary by Moriyama.
Later work