Daido Moriyama
at the Art Kiosk in Rougemont, Switzerland
Encompassing a range of styles in which Daido Moriyama works in, this presentation brings together an impeccable selection of the Japanese photographer’s works, ranging from snapshot-style images of urban night scenes to works from his celebrated 1987 project "Tights”.
The aesthetic of Moriyama’s snapshot images is a distinctive feature in the artist's work. Derived from his method of taking quick snapshots without looking through the viewfinder, Moriyama experiments with light, shade, and abstraction while allowing for serendipity and accident. His shots of urban nightlife settings, often taken in motion, have a particular sense of narrative and time. The more poetic and serene everyday shots of interiors represent the melancholic beauty of life at its most ordinary.
Moriyama's sensual photographs explore the dramatic and yet enigmatic side of the erotic. Close-up shots of lips, eyes, hands as well as legs and feet in fishnet tights testify to the artist’s fascination with the raw and sensuous. Placing the lens close to the subject, Moriyama’s images are akin to a visual study in form and texture.
Daido Moriyama: A short biography
Born in Osaka in 1938, and having witnessed the spectacular changes that transformed post-war Japan, Moriyama’s photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies a unique space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.
Moriyama’s work is included in numerous prominent public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Getty, Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The artist has had major solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Fondation Cartier, Paris, the Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
He currently lives and works in Tokyo.
"My photos are often out of focus, rough, streaky, warped, etc. But if you think about it, a normal human being will in one day perceive an infinite number of images, and some of them are focused upon, others are barely seen out of the corner of one’s eye."
Daido Moriyama.
Excerpt from “Daido Moriyama: stray dog”, Sandra S. Phillips, Daidō Moriyama, Alexandra Munroe, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999).