Daido Moriyama at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

Daido Moriyama Dog and Mesh Tights, 2014-2015

Twelve years after his first exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2003, Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama will return to the foundation for a new exhibition that focuses on his recent work. Running February 6 to June 5 the show features a large selection of color photographs, Daido Tokyo will shed light on this lesser-known yet ubiquitous aspect of his photographic practice over the last two decades. The Fondation Cartier has also commissioned a new work from Moriyama in conjunction with the exhibition. Entitled Dog and Mesh Tights, this immersive multiscreen projection of black and white photographs will plunge viewers into the commotion of the contemporary city, capturing fragments of daily life from its unrelenting urban hustle and bustle.

Like many other photographers of his generation, Moriyama witnessed the dramatic changes that took place in Japan in the decades following World War II. In response, he sought to invent a new visual language to express the conflicting realities of a society caught between tradition and modernity. Following his studies in graphic design in Osaka, Daido Moriyama decided to take up photography and moved to Tokyo in 1961. There, he gravitated toward the work of the avant-garde photographers of the Vivo Agency, in particular that of Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe, drawing from the former a fascination for the bizarre underworld of Japanese street life and from the latter a sense of the theatrical and the erotic. It was also during this time that he discovered the work of two American photographers, William Klein and Robert Frank, developing an interest in the action-oriented approach to street photography that characterizes their work. These photographers would notably influence Moriyama’s photographic style, inspiring him to capture his subjects while walking through the streets, using a small hand-held camera as if it were an extension of his body. These diverse influences can be seen in his early work – when he was starting out as a freelance photographer in 1964 – as well as later in his contributions to Provoke, an avant-garde photographic magazine he joined in 1968. Out of focus, vertiginously tilted or invasively cropped, Moriyama’s images reflect the disjunctive nature of contemporary urban experience.
This style of black-and-white photography would characterize the photographs of his first publications, Japan: A Photo Theater (1968) and Farewell, Photography (1972), and establish his reputation as a photographer of international importance.

Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color, 2008-2015