The image by itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable code like language. Yet it’s irreversible materiality – the reality that is cut out by the camera – constitutes the opposite side of language, and therefore new thought.
Takuma Nakahira et-al (Ryuichi and Vartanian, 2009: 17)
Photographer Daido Moriyama was a beneficiary of the rapid economic experienced by Japan after the Second World War. This boom led to the availably of affordable, easy to use cameras and a population that was ready to understand what photography could be (Vartanian, 2015:28). After failing to join the merchant navy (Moriyama, 2013) and shunning a career as a graphic designer in the wake of a difficult relationship break-down (Moriyama, 1997), he found the freedom of photography in 1961 as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe (b.1933). Shortly after he briefly became a member of the socially conscious, dissident photographic collective dubbed VIVO (Phillips and Munroe, 1999:9-11) and has spent the following 60 years thriving as an artist practicing, what Otto Steinert called, ‘Subjektive Fotografie’ (Fritsch, 2018:43) in the flourishing modernist tumult of post-bellum Japan. Quickly he developed a ‘beat’ style of shooting that is thematically comparable to Robert Franks. However, inspired by Nicéphore Niépce’s (b.1775-1833) photograph of a view out of his window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes (Shimizu, 2012:63), and built upon the early work of Shōmei Tōmatsu (b.1930 – 2012) (Baker, 2012:17) and William Klein’s (b.1928) ‘fluidisation’ (Shimizu, 2012:57) of photography, he readily embraced the hustle of the city streets to synthesise the conflicted aesthetic qualities known in Japan as Are-bure-boke, which translates to grainy, blurry and out of focus. Of Klein’s consequential influence he has written:
‘I was so touched and provoked by Klein’s photobook [New York] that I spent all my time on the street of Shinjuku, mixing myself in with the noise of the crowds, doing nothing except clicking with abandon the shutter of a camera I seized from a friend… I learned from his photos real experiences, not theories. Kleins images, which were rough, simple, and even violent at a glance, made me realise the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art’ (Moriyama, 1999:12)
The application of this avant-garde tenet became the vernacular for a time in Japan and is reminiscent of the pictorialism aesthetic of the early twentieth century. Moriyama (2013) recounts his approach as being lazy and casual; his photographic eye glancing rather than staring at subjects as he passes them by (Taki, 2012:57). This method of photographing that compressively shunned the modernist conventions of the time, which called for the production of carefully constructed compositions and exquisitely crafted prints. He understood photographs as equivalent, assigning no special status to any image, ‘copied images, or those of naked women, these have the same value’. (Nishii, 2013). He did not consider himself an artist, a title he defined as someone making something out of nothing. But he followed his believe that photography’s ’very essence does not create something from nothing… [it] has no originality’ (Moriyama, 2013), he is just copying something that is already there. He takes, rather than makes a photograph, while acknowledging and accepting the inescapable contradiction that a photographers personal aesthetic and memories will be imbedded in every image they take. This is an appreciation of the fundamental photographic problem of crossing between a multitude of perspectives and the disparate realities we all inhabit.
In 1961, Ken Dōmon (b.1909-1990) and Shōmei Tōmatsu published the Nagasaki Document. This then inspired the photographers William Klein and Ed ven der Elsken (b.1925-1990) to visit Japan, where their own raw style of stream of consciousness photography was adopted and adapted by the young Japanese photographers (Badger, 2008:123) including Moriyama (Ross, 1999:7). Like Robert Frank, Moriyama was a great fan of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. He likened the experience of reading it to: ‘Flipping through a photography book that shuffled together pictures by William Klein, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, Larry Clark, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and even Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams in one volume’ (Moriyama, 2006:116). Moriyama recognised Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness writing style as unorthodox but began to visualise vividly the journey being undertaken by the novels principle characters, in his mind the prose became images.
In 1968 Moriyama was involved in a magazine that was published in Japan called Provoke – Provocative materials for thinkers (Nishii, 2001:4). He contributed to the second and third issues which focused on the erotic, and the potential of photographic communication respectively. His work here was militantly subjective, he continued to do everything in his power to challenge the notion of what a photograph was and what it had the power to do (Nishii, 2001:6). The magazine, which only ran for three issues, was founded in 1968 by Takuma Nakahira (b.1938-2015), ‘the most important Japanese photographer you have never heard of’ (Franz, 2015) (He burned all his negatives in 1973), Yutaka Takamashi (b.1935), Takahiko Okada (b.1939-1997) and Koji Taki (b.1928-2011). Following Nakahira (2012:34), who believed that ‘the process of taking photographs is not a representation of the captured world, but rather a searching and recognising journey through the vastly expanding and endless world’. Their radical agenda was clear: Marxist, anti-war, anti-establishment and rebellious (Felix, 2005:116). The magazines manifesto offers a clear existentialist explanation of what the founder believed photography should be used to achieve:
‘The image by itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable code like language. Yet it’s irreversible materiality – the reality that is cut out by the camera – constitutes the opposite side of language, and therefore new thought. At this singular moment – now – language loses its material basis – in short its reality – and drifts in space, we photographers must go on grasping with our own eyes those fragments of reality that cannot possibly be captured with existing language, actively putting forth materials against language and against thought. Despite some reservations, this is why we have given Provoke the subtitle “provocative materials for thought”’
(Nakahira et-al. 1968 cited in Kaneko & Vartanian, 2009: 17).
Provoke aimed to break the notion that the photograph was always to be considered a document. The work they published used blur, grain and wandering focus to draw the viewers’ attention to the fact that a photograph contained little concrete information or a tangible narrative (Kaneko & Vartanian, 2009: 17). The magazine and Moriyama understood that their chosen medium had a purpose beyond mimicry (however, mimicry was not entirely dismissed as Moriyama’s Andy Warhol (b.1928-1987) inspired images of supermarket shelves, found in the third issue, prove); It’s aspires to appropriate a poetic vision, one that works to expose a verity that exists beyond language and to transcend the reality/perspective philosophical paradigm. They recognised that photography was contingent, and its unexpected nature should not be dismissed but embraced as an artform of sublimated chaos; sadness and pain metamorphose into something beautiful.
In 1972 Moriyama published A Hunter (2019b). The monograph is the exemplification of the combination of photographer’s photographic philosophy developed over the previous decade, and his personal existential philosophy. The latter can be explored via Moriyama’s admiration of the controversial novelist Yukio Mishima (b.1925-1970), whose publications often addressed feelings of intrinsic emotional loneliness. The writer has been compared to the French existentialist thinkers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre (Phillips 1999:11). Moriyama nihilistic expressiveness is seemingly rooted in the thinking of this philosophical movement. And it was perhaps Camus’ solution to strife of a nihilistic existence rather than Mishima’s (Mishima committed seppuku [suicide]) that saw Moriyama taken by the notion of travel. Inspired further by Alan D’Arcangelo’s (b.1930-1998) minimalist paintings of American highways, he set out to explore the vehicular arteries which connected Tokyo to the rest of Japan (Baker, 2012:19) before embarking on a road trip across the rest of the country. With the understanding that ‘there is a lot of game waiting for [him] on the highways’ (Moriyama, 2019b:35) and identifying himself as ‘a hunter with a camera’ (Moriyama, 1968) who was going to capture it. He set off from Odawara City, to hitch-hike around the country with just his camera for company:
‘Again I will head out to meet the asphalt, in expectation of countless encounters with the outside world, and I can barely wait to begin the journey.
Why? There is nothing particularly great about the asphalt roads, neither is there much joy in travelling with long-distance trucks. The mountains, roads and factories have nothing noteworthy to offer either…
But the journey offers me the passage of time in everything small and big contained within; my inner world, changing every second, crossing with the outer world in unlimited capacity; the refreshing diversity of constantly overlapping new images… yes, that is the answer I will go with.
At any rate, I will continue photographing whatever abrasive thing I encounter in my restless travels along the national highways. My panoramic approach will, whether I like it or not, help me extend the variation of my everyday experience’
(Moriyama, 2019b:35)
With a sceptical eye he favoured investigating the things that bothered him in post war Japan, often centring on the Americanisation of his home country (Badger, 2008:123). This focus on an encroaching western culture is perhaps a distraction for the real motivation as Moriyama has said, ‘I was not against America, or the war, or against politics. I was against photography’ (Moriyama, 1998). His subject matter was not exhaustive and impossible to list, but he actively stalked the ‘sexual’ and the ‘nasty’ (Moriyama, 2017), he investigated the deviant things that surrounded him; ‘Briskly weaving [his] way through the avenues, every cell in [his] body became as sensitive as radar, responsive to the life of the streets’ (Moriyama, 1997b). By pushing photography to breaking point he actively captured a nations emotion (Vartanian, 2006:55) and by ‘looking for streets, for cities, for the world. In the process,’ explains Moriyama,’ I’m looking for myself’ (2017). Moriyama wrote ‘For Kerouac it was the typewriter; for me it would be the camera. Whatever measures it took, I wanted to go out on the road’ to discover ‘fragments of the world and splinters of reality’ (2006:121-122).
Originally published in 1972 (the same year as A Hunter), Farewell Photography (2019), not only cemented his enduring notoriety but marks the zenith for Are-bure-boke technique. The book is part of his attempt to ‘get to the end’ (Moriyama, 2012b:36) of photography, a place where the constituted parts of his photographic adage took his images into abstraction and pushed the limits of what was considered photography (Baker, 2012:15). Thumbing through the book while referring back to my research on Albert Camus, it is apparent that the work is an embodiment of either a creative or existential crisis, perhaps even both. However, Sandra Phillips (1999:20) has observed that ‘Moriyama could not be called an existentialist in any strict sense, but this book is certainly informed by the spirit of existential crisis that faced his friends and associates’. The images are the result of Moriyama ‘brush[ing] through’ life (Moriyama, 2019:7) abstracted and raw; dust and scratches from the negatives remain as does the evidence of the film spools. Minoru Shimizu (2012:60) explains that ‘these are all expressions of a kind of “subtraction,” a means to erase the photographer’s self, his thoughts, subjective expressions and intentions’. It is usually not clear what the photograph is depicting, but that is the point, this book is not about denotation rather an exercise in pushing what can be considered reality by the photographic medium to its absolute limits. When discussing the soon to be published book in 1971 with Takuma Nakahira, Moriyama (2019:4) goes into more detail:
‘In essence, it’s about reality—the reality of Niépce, and the reality of newspaper photographs—as two opposite points. The former, Niépce’s reality, questions the act of capturing people’s and objects’ likeness—something that resonates very strongly with me… I’m thinking of the title “Farewell Photography.” It might seem like a somewhat ironic title, but it’s about my feelings of hate and wanting to say farewell to spiritually peaceful photographs, to photographs that show no doubt about what photography means, in other words photographs that lack all reality.’
When looking at both A Hunter and Farewell Photography we see Moriyama’s overt subjectivity at work. In a short film about his career, Moriyama (2013) recognised that ‘A photo is produced from a photographer’s specific perspective. However, when it is presented in front of different viewers various perspectives will be developed by viewers, which will enrich the content of the photo’ Moriyama has a responsive nature, his engagement with photography is near total. When he talks about his craft, he appears more sapient than many of his contemporaries, all of his senses are stimulated and he elucidates his passion, motives and methods with poetic flare; ‘I love to observe people in cities, in which an uncanny scent floats. I love to burrow in mysterious lanes to detect the unusual scent’ (Moriyama, 2013) ‘When you look at [my] photos, you can smell the city… Holding a camera lets you travel in a very real way. I can only shoot this moment. Now is all I have’ (Moriyama, 2017b).
Developed versions of Moriyama’s subjective Are-bure-boke style emerged and came to define the visual aspirations of a whole generation of post-war Japanese photographers; to them ‘it was a way of depicting the reality they were experiencing… the real world looked exactly this way’ (Iizawa, 2018).
As one of the six founders of the aforementioned VIVO Cooperative in Japan, Kikuji Kawada (b.1933) promoted an evocative, emotional and long-form approach to documentary photography. Inspired by Ken Dōmon, Ihei Kimura (b.1901-1974) and Hiroshi Hamaya (b.1915-1999) (Kawada, 2018:49) he confronted head-on the transformation of modern Japanese society and the side-effects of westernisation that the post-war American occupation inevitably brought with it. The work was experimental, polemic and symbolistic and resulted in the now infamous photobook of 1965; The Map.
The manner in which Kawada’s chooses to shoot conforms to the Japanese vernacular of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. High contrast, grainy black and white images. With an aversion to ordered composition. He, like Moriyama is the antithesis of the geometrically bound straight photography advocates working in Europe in the at period (Bresson et al). Kawada’s fascination with photography comes from an appreciation of the ‘Paradoxical character of photography: you can take photographs of reality and they become a lie, but you can also take photographs of lies and they become real’ (Kawada, 2018:50).
Later in his career Kawada turned his gaze skyward and in 2015 he published ‘The Last Cosmology’. Inspired by the apocalyptic sky-scapes of the expressionist painter Emil Nolde and a reading of Gaston Bachelard’s L’air et les songes he embarked on a 20-year project that eventually became Last Cosmology. Between 1980 and 2000, mini projects were published with ethereally titles such as ‘Air and Dreams’ and ‘The Last Sun’. It wasn’t unwtil the end of this period that it was curated into an exhibition and accompanying publication.
Kawada was interested to portraying how the modern human existence has divorced us from the beauty of the celestial movement above us and the consequences of living under the infinite cosmological grandeur by focusing on the relationship between the terrestrial and the cosmic. He captured astronomical phenomena—solar eclipses, dramatic cloud formations, and the movements of the heavens.
The Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki (b.1886-1965), offers an argument that could possibly explain the origins of the dark and shadowed visual aesthetic chosen by Moriyama and his contemporaries. In his book, In Praise of Shadows (1991), first published in 1977, he identifies how in images ‘there somehow emerges differences in national character’. Surrendering to the fast pace of the Western world following the end of World War Two, the Japanese character had to abandon the cultural path it had been forging for thousands of years. This forsaken character can be incapsulated by the traditional Japanese home environment which, even to this day, has somewhat resisted outside influence; It is dark place, lit not with natural or electric light, but candles or lanterns. Japanese art was designed for such environments and the shadows objects cast became of the upmost importance. Kitchenware, revered as artistic objects in Japan, is often crafted in a dark lacquer. The traditional food eaten out of lacquer bowels comes in many shades of white; in a dimly lit room the way the light catches the white food among its shadowed surroundings is considered a thing of beauty by Tanizaki:
‘The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. And so, it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else’
(Tanizaki, 1991:29).