Daido Moriyama is a Japanese photographer known for his black-and-white, avant-garde imagery, famously seen in the pages of his magazine Kiroku, then referred to as Record, which he launched in June 1972. Documenting tension and transformation in post-war Japan, the magazine now stands at 50 issues, 30 of which were edited by Mark Holborn into a 2017 photobook of the same name. Now, in a direct sequel, Record 2, edited by Holborn and published by Thames & Hudson, picks up where his 2017 volume left off, presenting raw, high-contrast snapshots from issues 31 to 50 of his cult magazine. Below, in an exclusive extract from the book’s introduction, titled Time Tunnel, Holborn discusses themes of memory, history and impermanence, and how Moriyama captures Japanese city life through his gritty, transient lens
Daido Moriyama could be described in future histories of photography as a stalker on the streets of Japanese cities, where he claimed his zone – a dense, harsh, high-contrast territory. He probed the surfaces, piercing the apparent dream within which the inhabitants moved. He returned with fragments or shards of experience gathered on mundane daily rounds. A simple trip to the coffee shop could be revelatory. The street has provided him with a lifetime of visual nourishment. The cities in Moriyama’s pictures appear not as inanimate constructions but as vast breathing and growing entities sprouting towers and tunnels, railway tracks and highways along which humanity passes. His photographic language was born in an age of unprecedented change.
His first book, Japan, A Photo Theater, was published at the end of the sixties and was marked by a theatrical convention. Much of the work was made among the theatre groups on the cultural peripheries of Tokyo. Moriyama had entered this fringe under the guidance of avant-garde writer and filmmaker Shūji Terayama. The sense of performance persists. The city has since become an enormous backdrop. The urban surface is adorned with sign language and poster imagery, against which the populace is framed – in motion, in costume, masked and comatose. Moriyama’s book was greeted with acclaim. Its grain and fragmented form, as rough as any discarded newsprint or torn magazine pages, echoed a mood that challenged convention. An appetite existed for a new language that corresponded to the prevailing sense of tension and transformation. The first issue of the magazine Provoke, a visual manifesto for that language, was published in November 1968. The second issue, to which Moriyama contributed, appeared in March 1969, and the third and final issue in August 1969. To place these publications in a wider context, huge demonstrations took place across Japan on International Anti-War Day on 21 October 1968. At Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, seven hundred were arrested. On the same day a year later, 25,000 riot police were deployed in Tokyo alone. Moriyama was present. “That day was my moment; on that day I lost my belief in everything. My worldview, my standards, everything disappeared without resistance,” he said in a conversation with his friend, the photographer, theorist and co-founder of Provoke, Takuma Nakahira. The conversation was published in Moriyama’s 1972 landmark book Farewell Photography. A photograph of the crowds in Shinjuku that day appears towards the end of the book. It is as resonant an image as, say, an Eisenstein shot of the storming of the Winter Palace. History itself is portrayed. But in this case, the scene was not staged for the camera. The centre had snapped. Who knew what would be unleashed?
Out of this moment of confrontation, Shōmei Tōmatsu, the elder photographer and great influence on Moriyama, published his book Oh! Shinjuku (1969). Beside the strippers of Kabuki-cho, Tōmatsu photographed the rioters in action. There is an overwhelming impression of silence, like a newsreel in slow motion, as history unwinds. Beside the collective force of student armies encountering armoured police is the smell of tear gas, the sight of burning petrol bombs and the feel of shattered glass. The faces of the demonstrators are contorted on the pages in a soundless grimace. From these volatile elements, a new photography would surface.
For a period of a year, from the summer of 1972, the first five issues of Record were published by Moriyama as an ongoing diaristic project. Volume 6 and the re-launched series appeared decades later in 2006. Record originally followed in the wake of Provoke. Moriyama had been a witness to the storm. After the rage followed an eerie, widespread, but unspoken acceptance that the years of post-war austerity were over. A revised national identity had to be forged. The Osaka Expo of 1970 heralded the new era of an economic miracle. The American bases, the presence of which had been the target for the rioters of the late sixties, remained, but by 1975 Saigon had fallen and the map of East Asia had to be redrawn. Everything had changed.
Record today reveals how that language forged some fifty years ago equipped Moriyama with a foundation. The streets are even denser. The facades are slicker. The shabby ferro-concrete of post-war reconstruction has given way to more polished exteriors. Yet, the alleys and the maze of the city provide the perfect habitat for the photographer who prowls like his chosen alter-ego, the backstreet dog. The photographer groping for a path through the fury of the late sixties and early seventies has changed, as have we all, with the perspective that ensues with ageing. What now distinguishes the tone of the work is a melancholic cloud. The sense of transience, a quality at the core of Japanese perceptions, is deepened. Terayama is long dead. Tōmatsu has passed, as has Moriyama’s fellow photographer and friend, Masahisa Fukase. So, too, has Moriyama’s companion, Takuma Nakahira. Photography, derived from the “freezing” of a moment, was often misconstrued as a mirror on the present, when, inescapably, it can never be anything other than a token of the past. Moriyama’s Record today offers a sense of elegy. Moriyama is not only confronting what he sees; he is also remembering what has vanished.
Daido Moriyama – Record 2 is published by Thames & Hudson and available here.
