Daido Moriyama - Memories of a Dog

Blurred, Dark and Grainy

by: Colin Pantall

Daido Moriyama was seven years old when America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The post-war years he grew up in were the bleakest time in Japanese history. Living amid scenes of destruction and occupied by the Americans, the Japanese people were dislocated from their past. Having effectively lost their identity, they turned inwards and dedicated themselves to the rebuilding of their country. Economically, it was a hugely successful venture. Culturally and psychologically, it was a time of darkness, depression and spiritual emptiness.

This was the environment Daido Moriyama grew up in, and the atmosphere and mood of this environment is what he photographed. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, he shot the world around him - the streets and alleyways around his Shinjuku home, the roads on which he travelled, the television which he watched. He photographed his own disturbed, inner state, and in doing so captured the troubled soul of post-war Japan.

Moriyama’s photographs from this time are some of the most distinctive images ever made. Blurred, dark and grainy, they are also completely at odds with traditional ideas of what a good photograph is supposed to be.

“Daido’s work is difficult,” says Michael Hoppen, whose Michael Hoppen contemporary Gallery represents Moriyama in the UK. “Sometimes people see it and think, ‘Why would anyone want to buy Daido’s work? It looks like he doesn’t know what he is doing. So when you see his work, you have to forget everything you know about photography. Instead you need to know something about his background and what he’s trying to do.”

“Daido Moriyama is a true visionary,” says Martin Parr. “He has a very distinctive language that he’s made his own. There are only 5 or 6 truly great photographers in the world and he’s one of them.”

Memories of a Dog (published by Nazraeli Press) is the first English translation of a collection of Moriyama’s writing from the 1980s. Printed in parallel with his photography, it is a true classic - a work of immense poetry in which Moriyama connects photography, memory, longing and despair.

“Memories of a Dog shows he is thinking about what he does,” says Michael Hoppen. “It shows us the meaning in his work and the emotional turmoil that he went through as a photographer and an artist to reach the level he has reached. He has been through some torrid times and has a dark vision of the world. Moriyama’s work is about despondency, depression and despair.”

In one chapter, Moriyama longs for the freedoms of a sentimentalised childhood spent foraging around old US bases. He visits one and writes how, “On every street corner, a sense of weariness and vulgarity pervades, like a dusty sun-bleached painting in primary colors.” The streets are deserted, the landscape is faded and filled with abandonment and despair.

Another chapter finds Moriyama seeking to escape himself through an endless cycle of travelling and shooting. He attempts to capture on film the gentle consolations of life, “...the faint white profile of a woman that grazed a corner of the windshield... the gaze of a boy standing still in a field are like images once seen on a screen that are burned vividly into my mind’s eye...,” yet, “...no matter how much I shoot most of what I want simply flows away like water spilling through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images...”

Then there are those images, those ‘fragments’ of half-forgotten memories - the darkness of the night and the emptiness of the road, seascapes that stretch out into unrelenting darkness, streets and alleyways where humanity flits, half-concealed and ghoul-like, between extremes of shadow and light.

Although Moriyama uses photography to understand himself and the world around him, he does so very much on his own terms. “In a way the camera is his divining rod,” says Hoppen. “It has it’s own energy and impetus and makes him take the photograph, rather than the other way round. His photography is, like all good photography, a search for truth.”

Moriyama’s search for truth really began in 1959 when he saw William Klein’s ground-breaking photography of New York for the first time. Freely shot in high-contrast tabloid style, Klein’s radically cropped images captured the dark energy of the city and its people.

“I learned from his photographs real experiences,” Moriyama has said of Klein’s New York. “Klein’s images, which were rough, simple and even violent at a glance, made me realise the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art.”
This openness to new and different ideas is another clue to Moriyama’s success. He cites Western influences as varied as Weegee, Warhol, Atget and Frank, as well as writers like Proust, Kerouac and Kafka, all adding up to a visual perspective that makes his work accessible on a global scale.

But Moriyama was also influenced by Japan’s greatest photographers - people like Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe. Inspired by them, he made famous images that help define post-war Japan. Look at his images of Japanese soldiers in a coffee shop, his Computer Age workers, his Tokyo Housing Development couple or his high-kicking marching band, and you are taken directly into the claustrophobic world of 1960s Japan.

But as the 1960s progressed, Moriyama looked increasingly inwards. While other photographers were shooting the Vietnam War or the transformation of Japan into an economic superpower, Moriyama became divorced from the time. Instead he engaged with the margins of society, prowling the streets for images to reproduce in Moriyama’s favoured form - the book.

“His work is designed for the book - not a magazine or gallery,” says Michael Hoppen. “In a traditional photo-essay, there is an easy-to-read narrative. Daido’s narrative is about irrationality - of life and trying to make sense of what is going on around us.”

The most irrational of Moriyama’s books are The Hunter and Bye-bye Photography - both published in 1972. Images from The Hunter in Daido Moriyama include his mournful nudes, threatening landscapes and Moriyama’s famous picture of a barefoot prostitute fleeing down a rubble-strewn alleyway.

During this time, Moriyama also worked for Provoke - a magazine whose influence far outlasted its 5 issues. “Provoke challenged the preconceptions of photography,” says Parr, “and tried to make it more about how you feel about the world, rather than how to describe the world.”

How Moriyama felt about the world was evident from Bye-bye Photography. “Daido was on the verge of giving up photography totally,” says Parr, “and then exploded with this book of scratched, blurred and dark images of posters, newspapers and televisions.”

It wasn’t well-received at the time, and many people feel that its subject matter is not really worth recording. “He makes pictures of newspapers or television and people say, ‘oh , that’s easy - it’s just a picture of a newspaper or advertisement’. But why is that any less valid or worthwhile than a picture of a field or a landscape,” says Michael Hoppen.

“The trouble is people see his work and think it’s easy. But actually it’s very hard to do, because he’s photographing things he knows in a very truthful way - a very emotional way. In terms of technique, you can see what he does, and how he does it, but that isn’t what makes a Moriyama image. There are plenty of people who try to copy him, but ultimately they fail because there is always something missing.”

More recently, Moriyama’s photography has become calmer, perhaps mirroring his more stable psychological state - he has left the depression, insomnia and addictions of the past behind him. Yet still there is that truthfulness in his work, that search for the ultimate reality. “When you see his photography,” says Martin Parr, “you know it’s his work. He can make iconography out of virtually nothing.”

But Moriyama’s iconic figures of dogs, cats, roses and hats have another element - a certain sadness, and it is Moriyama’s ability to capture the melancholy and darkness of life that really makes him unique. His camera captures a world that is becoming increasingly violent, turbulent and full of uncertainty. It is the world Moriyama grew up in and is the world we all inhabit. Perhaps that is why his pictures have such a visceral effect.

In Memories of a Dog, Moriyama remembers an anti-American riot in 1960s Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and the transformation of the innocuous and unthreatening into the dark and violent. He considers the changes since that time and writes, “The times look quiet at first glance. But I think they are actually more brutal. That dark night in Shinjuku was nothing but a trial run. And to me, as always, the coming of the night is frightening.”