DAIDO80:
Vintage photographs from the 80s by Daido Moriyama
Curated by Diego Cortez
November 17, 2005 - January 31, 2006
Main Gallery, John Hope Franklin Center
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 17, 2005
5:30 - 7:30 PM :: Franklin Center Gallery
(Buses available starting at 6:00 PM to the opening celebration of the ACT Warehouse)
In 1972 Moriyama published Farewell Photography and once and for all summed up his photography. It is said that Moriyama had to suffer in the following years because he had no alternative style to the “grainy, blurred and out-focused” quality of his past photographs. However, Moriyama had introduced graininess, blur and out-focus in order to make his photograph even more realistic than a sheer straight picture. This realism was rooted in the ethics of modern documentary photography. According to this, photography has to capture, without embellishment and as transparently as possible, a pure, neutral existence of the world as it is, which precedes any system of human social values and symbols. Hence the artist’s subjectivity and aesthetic consciousness should be excluded so that photography can directly touch the world. The task of photography never lies in the artistic expression but in the direct, real depiction of the world.
Thereafter, away from the modernist photography, he suffered without any alternative to that realism. Yamagishi, a critic and friend, suddenly died and Nakahira, his close colleague, fell into amnesia. After the years of lonely struggle Moriyama came to a simple fact that photography is a feeling of a presence of a past light. The alternative to the realism of photography was an individual’s “real” sensitivity to light.
Moriyama’s works in the early eighties are characterized by the realness of his feeling the light pouring out of a single photograph. Toward the middle of the decade, however, a critical consciousness against fetishism and aestheticism of the ‘light and shadow’ emerges in the artist. He begins to move. The eighties are the era of a latent change that could be traced as a move from the ‘simple aesthetics of light and shadow’ to the ‘complexity of photographic everyday’.
For Moriyama, regarding both his biography and photography, the eighties were a self-reflexive period. The reflection on his seventies and the reference to the photography became a necessary passage through which he departed the unique standpoint of Light and Shadow that had been achieved through the agonizing seventies, in order to modify himself toward the new style in the nineties. Looking chronologically at the nineteen works that are seemingly dominated as ever by the ‘light and shadow’, we would still find a gradual transition in which the artist goes away from themes such as ‘memory’, ‘light’ or ‘journey’, passes through self-critical and self-referential series and discover an ordinary life.
For more information on this and other exhibits at the Franklin Center, contact Pamela Gutlon, p.gutlon@duke.edu.