Front page of Vintage Prints

Daido Moriyama, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Araki Nobuyoshi form the grand triumvirate of modern Japanese masters of photography. If Araki is the gritty recorder of hidden Tokyo and Sugimoto the conceptualist, then Daido ploughs his unique furrow between the two with his pictures of the chaotic everyday. Daido has said that his "photographs are the history of memory". Every print is overloaded with a sense of deja vu, sequences unfold where Daido prowls the Japan of his youth, and in these tragic, sooty images we discover a rawness and vitality rarely seen in photography. Elevating Daido's work into greatness is that his despairing photos emit a sublime and haunting beauty.

Published in conjunction with his solo exhibition at Michael Hoppen Gallery (London, 2004), Vintage Prints is 51 looseleaf folded broadsheets of Daido Moriyama's photography from the 1960s to 1980s. Presented in a resealable mylar bag like a piece of evidence for a court case, the prints are so heavy and inky that you may find yourself every few pages examining the pads of your fingers for stains. Each photograph is reproduced half page, full page, or double page.

Boy with halo

The apocalyptic view of the world that Daido exhibits was a reaction to the pictorialist photography that was popular at the time. Against the backdrop of American occupation, student uprisings, and the coming of rock and roll music, Daido was a key member of the photographic movement Provoke. Although not as overtly political as other members of Provoke he would prowl American "base towns", skirt sometimes violent student demonstrations, and engage in a sort of postwar nostalgia. The heavily manipulated photographs that resulted have an almost unearthly vitality to them. The off kilter photo of a young crossed eyed boy, shown above, is the japanese contemporary of Diane Arbus's "Boy with toy hand grenade, Central Park". Like Arbus's photo, a sense of fear first comes from the eerie scene only to be swamped by pathos.

The Stray Dog is Moriyama's alter ego

Daido's most famous photograph is of an almost rabid dog. As twinned outcasts, this dog has become the alter ego of Daido himself. He explains in his memoirs that "I had taken a photograph of a stray dog, showing the whites of its eyes and snarling, on the streets outside a US air base in the town of Misawa in Aomori Prefecture in northeast Japan … Thereafter that dog and I came to be seen and talked about as if somehow superimposed on each other. Also, the figure I cast during that time, roaming around town and on the backstreets, carrying my camera, appeared in others' eyes very much like a stray dog." The photograph appears in most of Daido's publications, often in mirror image or cropped differently.

Showing several of the unbound pages

While critics of photography may justifiably see the social value of Daido's work and attribute it great photojournalistic merit, Daido distances himself from any such pretense. Subject to little commercial or editorial pressure, he classes himself as an "ultrapersonal" amateur.

"My favorite objects [to photograph] are motorcycles, jukeboxes, mannequins, and trees; my biggest dislikes may be children, jet aircrafts, houses, and fish" he says (Asahi Camera, June 1973). Eschewing any assertion that there is intent or some grand statement behind his work, he claims the photographs in his portfolio are merely documents of his memory and experience. This philosophy was somewhat of a divergence from the charter of Provoke and part of the reason he soon began publishing solo books. His first post-Provoke book, the title variously translates as Sayonara Photography, Farewell Photography, or Bye Bye Photography Dear, bravely discarded any previous notion of what photography was as a direct challenge to his contemporaries.

Outcasts

The streets of Japan

Vintage Prints in its electrostatic bag

But back to Vintage Prints. Do the reproductions in this publication preserve the rawness and freneticism that Daido subscribed to when they were first published? Yes, absolutely. Some of the prints are barely recognisable as objects at all, but the grimy images congeal into a haunting series. There are images like stills from a nightmare - prowling men, scowling cats, crocodiles, and Marilyn Monroe. There are the icons of postwar Japan - bombers, sleaze, TV, and neon. And there are fragments of images, like fleeting memories, interspersed between Daido's motifs of cars, planes, legs, and fish. This was a new style of photography when first published, rejecting not only pictorialism but the light hearted formalism of Catier Bresson, Robert Frank, and the like.

This review began by naming Daido Moriyama as a hybrid of Araki and Sugimoto. The frantic scattershot method of Araki combined with the over riding sense of time and memory that Sugimoto is so famous for resembles the photography of Daido. But it is not as straightforward as this. Daido Moriyama is the hunter, a self assigned outcast, with his raw detached observation he allows us a glimpse into his terrible world. Since it is a compendium of several decades of work, Vintage Prints is a great introductory book for those who are new to the work of this master photographer.

Buy Daido Moriyama's Stray Dog.

* If you have any comments regarding the accuracy of details in this review, or you have additional details that others may be interested in, please be kind enough to contact me so that I can incorporate your information.