Daido Moriyama’s Homecoming in Japan

Few photographers are as internationally beloved as Daido Moriyama. The legend of postwar Japanese photography is famous as a founder of Provoke, the storied, short-lived avant-garde journal published in the late 1960s. Born in 1938, Moriyama has been steadily working for well over half a century, witnessing dramatic transformations in Japan’s society, economy, and media culture.

In 2022, Thyago Nogueira, curator at Instituto Moreira Salles, organized a large-scale Moriyama retrospective in São Paulo. The exhibition has since traveled to Helsinki, Berlin, and Lausanne, and this spring, as part of Kyotographie, the annual photography festival in Kyoto, the show had its long-anticipated homecoming in Japan. Presented at the Kyocera Museum, the presentation included editorial work from the 1960s outlining Moriyama’s subjective approach to image-making,a focus on the radical experimentation seen in his 1972 book Farewell Photography, work from the 1980s, and his ongoing reflections on consumerism, memory, history, and the possibilities of image reproduction. Nogueira notes that Moriyama “wanted to promote photography as a reproducible tool and a democratic language, thinking of the camera as a photocopying machine. The more automatic, direct, banal, the more original and radical.” Nogueira’s goal with the touring show was to showcase these ideas through an installation that matched the energy of Moriyama’s indefatigable vision.

Michael Famighetti: This show has been traveling for years, but this is the first time the exhibition is being presented in Japan. How is this iteration different?

Thyago Nogueira: The exhibition was originally planned for Brazil. It started as a small research project but grew in scale and became a full retrospective exhibition of Moriyama’s career. The presentation in Kyoto is not different from the other presentations, but it is the first time what is presented is reconnected to the place and the people addressed in the exhibition, which makes it a totally different experience. In São Paulo, London, or Berlin, most of the audience was looking at a foreign reality, whereas now visitors are looking at themselves and their own history. Bringing the show to Japan meant a lot to me. It was also an opportunity to reciprocate Daido’s generosity in allowing me to dive into his mind and work for so many years.

Famighetti: Moriyama has exhibited—and published—prolifically over the years. What did you feel was left to say or explore in his work?

Nogueira: The show is not only a retrospective exhibition in the traditional sense but also an exercise to present the different conceptual approaches Moriyama explored. That is expressed through his work but also through the conception of the exhibition, with the wallpapers and the reproductions of publications and images. The show is a historical retrospective of an artist`s career, which began at a crucial moment in Japan’s history, but also an exhibition about the language of photography. It shows how Daido dove into philosophical questions about photography that were created at its invention and that we are still trying to fully understand.

Famighetti: What types of questions about a growing, pervasive media culture was he aiming to explore?

Nogueira: First, I wanted to call the visitor’s attention to an entire generation of photographers, writers, designers, and editors who worked collaboratively within the editorial industry, in dialogue with the mass media industry—instead of the traditional market of art galleries or museums. They embraced a public output through a keen observation of culture and politics. It was a rather democratic perspective. I was drawn by this energy and commitment, by this trust in the editorial industry as a public space for debates, as a platform to shape visions and ideas. When we think today of social media, this becomes especially relevant. These photographers were also looking at the way television constructed narratives to increase their audience, at how newspaper companies profited from sensationalism, or at how advertising manipulated people’s desires. I am not sure any other country dissected photography in such a conceptual and experimental way within the pages of commercial photography magazines that were distributed by newspaper companies and directed to a general, amateur audience. 

Famighetti: For Moriyama, which commercial magazines were most important?

Nogueira: In the 1960s, the main outputs for Moriyama’s photography were Camera Mainichi, edited by Shoji Yamagishi, and Asahi Camera, edited by Takayuki Komori. With the support of Yamagishi, Camera Mainichi published more than thirty features from Moriyama, including some of the most famous works from Japan: A Photo Theater. Komori also recognized his work early on and invited him to develop year-long series, such as Accident: Premeditated or Not, one of the most brilliant magazine photo-essays of all time. The series is a full course on photography theory.

These magazines and editors elevated the production of and debates on photography, and it is surprising how they managed to offer such high-level content in magazines that also promoted travel itineraries, equipment reviews, and photo contests for amateurs. You flip through often banal subjects and then stumble on a few extraordinary pages that come up like an apparition.

Moriyama published extensively in magazines with small print runs, such as Gendai no Me, but also large ones, like Playboy. This energy carried on through the 1960s and early 1970s. And in the 1980s, the magazines and their editors saved Moriyama from a personal and creative crisis: Asahi Camera published the extraordinary autobiographical series Memories of a Dog, and Shashin Jidai, edited by Akira Suei, published the magnificent Light and Shadow.

Famighetti: What were the challenges or benefits for you being an outsider, working from Brazil, in studying this specific culture of photography?

Nogueira: As a Brazilian curator studying Japanese art, learning from this history offered other models to think about visual culture and creative knowledge outside of the dominant European and American canons. These shifted commercial or “marginal” perspectives helped me to understand my own country’s artistic history. In Japan, different artistic languages such as cinema, performance, theater, music, and photography came together during the 1960s to build an independent, underground, and anti-establishment movement. Something similar happened in Brazil at that time during our dictatorship. I am interested in building those bridges, in learning from the connections that are not inscribed in history yet. I just regret the Moriyama show has not been presented in the United States, as American history and culture have been central for Daido: Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, William Klein, and New York itself are present in the show. 

Famighetti: Can you say more about how American culture is refracted through Moriyama’s work in the postwar moment? Are there some key examples in the show?

Nogueira: Moriyama grew up in a fractured and occupied country, invaded by American politics, culture, and money. He was fed by the American army during a period of scarcity but was also inspired by the work of Shomei Tomatsu, who photographed American military bases, exposing the victims of the atomic bombing and later the occupation in Okinawa. Moriyama was deeply impacted by American literature, music, and art. The visceral energy of his street photography connects to his early contact with William Klein’s New York, a disrupted gaze that helped to shape the famous are bure boke style. Moriyama’s reflections on image circulation, reproduction, and consumerism were shaped by Warhol’s Pop art, which he saw through the catalog of his Stockholm exhibition. It is hard to look at the Accident series and not think of Warhol. His decision to hitchhike across Japan was a response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And then he traveled to New York in 1971 with graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo. The work he produced on that trip was titled Another Country in New York. He described a parallel reality created by places, people, and scenes known from images as “another country” and processed the photos in a sort of do-it-yourself xerox zine.  

Famighetti: From the start of the project Moriyama made clear that he wanted print objects, magazines and books, to be foregrounded. What opportunities and challenges did this present for you?

Nogueira: When I started the project, I approached Daido with a more traditional curatorial vision, looking for the best vintage print of such and such image. I could immediately feel his disinterest in that conversation. But the moment we opened a magazine or a book, his eyes would shine and he would remember stories and talk about people. And he repeatedly mentioned that he made his works for the printed page, not for frames or museum walls.

With the immense help of Sohey Moriyama, the director of Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, and the collection of Kazuya Kimura, Yutaka Kambayashi, and Satoshi Machiguchi, I traced images back to their original publication in different Japanese magazines. And—boom!—my mind was blown. There was an entire visual world in those magazine pages that I had never seen. I started to think about the idea of reincarnation, how images were revived over and over through Moriyama’s career, every time in a different life.

Famighetti: What are some of the publications that anchor the exhibition?

Nogueira: Magazine culture is the center of this show.The walls are filled with almost four hundred reproductions, with magazine and book features in their entire sequence. Visual projections present entire books like Japan: A Photo Theater and Hunter, while a three-screen room created in collaboration with the Brazilian duo Coletivo Coletores offers an immersive experience of the entire archive of Record magazine. You can see the entire Accident feature on the walls; most of the original magazine features, published in the 1960s and 1970s, in vitrines; and Farewell Photography book pages as large-scale wallpaper. I have tried to present how different publications expressed Moriyama’s different approaches. He was never the same.

Famighetti: The presentation at the Kyocera Museum was designed by Osamu Ouchi. Moriyama has long collaborated intensively with designers on his many books. What was the role of the scenographer in shaping the presentation?

Nogueira: The show is an overflow of images in all forms and beauty, but one that doesn’t underestimate the visitor’s capacity to navigate and read the exhibition. The exhibition had to clearly convey Daido’s love for photography and the energy of magazines and publications and present his philosophical investigations of the media. One needs a multiskilled team to build an exhibition. Scenography is not only building background walls to hang pictures but is a grammar that shapes the curatorial language. Every museum in the tour reinterpreted this original concept according to their space. The great Ouchi-san, who collaborates with Kyotographie, did a brilliant interpretation that added movement and new perspectives to the presentation with the help of the producer Aki Miyake and many others.

Famighetti: Photography has changed and evolved dramatically in the six decades that Moriyama has been making photos—and the exhibition charts much of his long career. How would you describe the evolution of his thinking on photography over that time?

Nogueira: Of course, there has been a big change in photography due to different equipment and technical innovations, from black and white to color, from analog to digital. And Daido has navigated that. The show presents his initial love for photojournalism and his progressive understanding of how the media control their narratives; his reflections on truth, fiction, surveillance, voyeurism, consumerism, and sensationalism; and his later associations of photography and unconsciousness, memory, and history. But he seems to be asking a very simple question throughout his life: What is photography and how does it influence our lives? What shaped his career are the different answers he gave to that question, and the different realities created by images he was able to map.

Famighetti: How has the reception of this exhibition in Japan been compared with the earlier versions of the show in Europe or Brazil?

Nogueira: It has been extraordinary. The audience knows the history, vocabulary, questions.

Famighetti: How has your engagement with Moriyama over many years now changed your original understanding of his work?

Nogueira: If a curatorial investigation does not transform your vision, then something is wrong. I started with a strong admiration, but a limited perspective. I had seen many shows that praised him as a street photographer, which he is in fact. But the investigation opened a dozen other roads into to his production and mind. Moriyama has a famous quote that says, “When I am going along the road snapping the shutter as I read each moment, I become at times a poet, a scientist, a critic, a philosopher, a laborer, or a politician.” I think I have now met all those versions of Moriyama.