Portraits of an Urban Landscape: Daido Moriyama
AUTHOR TAKES A WANDER INTO THE GHOSTLY NEON-SOAKED IMAGINATION OF ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST EVOCATIVE VISUAL ARTISTS
There is a poem entitled “Epilogue” in Les Fleurs Du Malby the decadent 18th-century French poet Baudelairethat ends with the line “courtesans and pimps, you often offer pleasures the vulgar mob will never understand”. It’s an ironic, anti-establishment sentiment that has a no better visual parallel in the 21st century than in the celebrated work of much-lauded Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. In fact, it could be said of Moriyama that he is the Honoré Daumier of our era, capturing dispossessed outsider souls adrift in the all-enveloping urban sprawl of Tokyo through the open eye of his lens; asking us, by proxy, to stare into the neon-soaked gutter, between the cracks of capitalist artifice, to find something truly eternal; something pertaining to questions of dissolution, decadence and, ultimately, decay.
While some photographers intend to create a fantasy of reality, particularly in the vastly retouched spectrum of fashion photography, Moriyama reminds us that reality is itself simply a temporal fantasy of the individual – a smoke and mirrors dream machine of perceptive apparatus married to external stimuli over which we have little or no control. There is, as a direct result, nothing directional or explicit in a Moriyamaimage – he is not asking us to look at anything from a particular perspective, rather, he is inviting us to view reality in the flux of perpetually fleeting stasis, and he finds no better place to train his eye on humanity than upon the seediest and least celebrated of urban twilights.
The exclusive images AUTHOR presents here were all shot in the strangely decadent Tokyo district of Shinjuku, and were among the first of his color works to ever be exhibited, debuting at The Fondation Cartier to enormous critical acclaim. While they are a graphic departure from his stark monochromatic style, they contain the same cinematic, haunting quality as his earlier works. Somewhat reminiscent of the classic dystopian science-fiction classic Blade Runner, they serve as a color-soaked reminder that the machinations of capitalist progress are moving exponentially faster than we can possibly fathom and that the resulting decadent squalor is a fascinating product of the machine. In a sense, then, they are photographs, not only of the present, but also of the future – matching urban decay with spiritual malaise, and pertaining to some deep anxiety we all share on a fundamental level, but shall never quite find the time to understand.
Text by: John-Paul Pryor
Pictures Courtesy of the Artist / Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
