WEEKLY INSPIRATION - DAIDO MORIYAMA ON THE UNENDING NEWNESS OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Daido Moriyama, Eros or Something other then Eros, 1969

Japanese master-photographer Daido Moriyama has been at the forefront of the medium for more than fifty years. He has published dozens of volumes of photographs, including Japanese Theatre (1968), Farewell Photography (1972), Daido hysteric (1993–97), and Hokkaido (2008), as well as numerous collections of essays. On the occasion of his retrospective at Osaka’s National Museum of Art, Ivan Vartanian spoke with the photographer about vision and motivation, context and information, color and black and white, and the unending newness of photographs.

Moriyama: There are no themes in my work. It may be difficult for this to be understood outside of Japan—and indeed, often my work is understood as having a theme. Even if I were to construct a theme (and it’s not as if I’ve never done so), I can’t really think about it as I’m working. It is too limiting, and the camera work becomes restricted. Within that constraint the photograph becomes a fabricated image, and for me that is meaningless. The work I am shooting now is being done in Tokyo, but I don’t necessarily think of it as having a theme that is “Tokyo.” With a predetermined theme, possibilities are reduced, and the conversation then becomes one of form. That’s not something that I am capable of doing, really.

All images courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and Akio Nagasawa Gallery.