Daido Moriyama: The World through My Eyes

Description

This is a broad monograph devoted to Daido Moriyama, one of the pre-eminent names in contemporary Japanese photography along with Nobuyoshi Araki, Yasumasa Morimura, and Shomei Tomatsu. Moriyamas photography is provocative, both for the form it takes (dirty, blurry, overexposed, or scratched) and for its content. The viewers experience of the photo - whether it captures a place, a person, a situation, or an atmosphere - is the central thrust in his work, which vividly and directly conveys the artists emotions. His perspective and cultural background reveals aspects of Japan heretofore unknown. Seeing how he transforms the small, easily overlooked moments of everyday life into scenes of deep significance, the readers will be drawn into an investigation of reality in contemporary life.

Daido Moriyama studied photography under Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to work as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. Among the most famous of Moriyama's works is the 1971 shot of a stray dog (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Like many of his other works it features everyday objects or landscapes shot from unfamiliar angles, giving them a stark and unusual perspective. Among the artists that influenced Moriyama are Andy Warhol, William Klein and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Daido Moriyama's work is permanently on exhibition at Tepper Takayama Fine Arts, Boston. Filippo Maggia teaches History of Contemporary Photography and Design at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Turin.