DAIDO MORIYAMA
Du 6 février 2016 au 5 juin 2016
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain -
261 boulevard Raspail, 75014 Paris.
LE CLUB RECOMMANDE Tous les jours sauf le lundi de 11h à 20h. Nocturne le mardi jusqu'à 22h.
Un regard nippon
le rez-de-chaussée lui est dédié, avec ses travaux de recherche les plus récents. La première salle présente ses grandes installations en couleurs, un kaléidoscope d'images de Tokyo évoquant le choc visuel de la ville en perpétuel mouvement. La seconde abrite un diaporama géant de vingt-cinq minutes, Dog And Mesh Tights, rassemblant des clichés pris dans différentes villes du monde entre l'été 2014 et le printemps 2015 : un journal intime en noir et blanc d'une grande maîtrise formelle.
 |
The Guardian
Photography
Tokyo: the city that came out of the shadows
Daido Moriyama has spent his life obsessively photographing the dirty stairwells, neon signs and salarymen Japan’s capital in gritty black and white. Now, at 77, he’s exploding into glorious colour. Why?
One of Daido Moriyama’s best-known images is of a stray dog he encountered on a street in Aomori in northern Japan. Taken in 1971, it has become a metaphor for his way of working, symbolising his relentless wanderings though the streets of Tokyo in search of the essence of the city – an essence that for him often lies in the overlooked and the everyday, the makeshift and the mundane.
I shoot the same corner every time I pass, like a dog marking its territory
“There is nothing particularly fascinating about this place,” he says, as we stand before an image of a nondescript Tokyo street corner on which a red vending machine stands next to snow-crusted bicycles and an abandoned traffic cone. “It is close to where I live and I shoot it every time I pass, like a dog will return to piss on a corner it knows. I am like that dog marking its territory.”
The territory of Daido Tokyo, which has just opened at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, is both familiar and surprising, recognisable from Moriyama’s countless monochrome images of these same streets, but rendered in bright, bold colours. These recent photographs, made between 2008 and 2015, are a brave late statement, not least because they dispense with the the edgy blur and rough grain that is his signature, one that has been much copied.
A vending machine in the snow … Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color 2008-2015
‘I can smell the whole picture’ … Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color 2008-2015 Photograph: Courtesy the artist
As if to emphasise the contrast, an installation of Moriyama’s recent black and white work, entitled Dog and Mesh Tights, unfolds on four large screens in an adjacent space to a harsh soundtrack of urban noise. Shot in Hong Kong, Taipei, Arles, Houston and Los Angeles between July 2014 and March 2015, it makes each location look like a version of Moriyama’s Tokyo: a gritty, grimy, rundown, shadowy everywhere in which even the most prosaic subject matter – electric heaters, pipes, footprints, fabric, cats, telegraph poles, shop signs – take on an air of alien otherness.
Daido Moriyama’s series Dog and Mesh Tights, 2014-15.
An image from Daido Moriyama’s series Dog and Mesh Tights, 2014-15. Photograph: Courtesy the artist
Moriyama reveals the world as a constantly surprising, always unfinished or makeshift place; an everyday confusion of places and things that we do not notice until he places it in front of our eyes.
The emphasis here is on textures and surfaces: grids, patterns, shadows, outlines, all evoking the grain of the city as well as its movement and energy. “Black and white work is closer to what I consider the essence of photography,” he says, “whereas the colour photographs are much more about the experience of being in the streets. They are an attempt to give the experience of actually encountering the overload of posters and signs and advertisements as you wander though the city.”
Made mostly in the Shinjuku neighbourhood, the colour series is brasher in tone and more dramatic in its juxtapositions, not so much a map as a series of jarring signs and symbols. A mannequin’s face, encased in black plastic tape, is placed next to an open mouth – black lips and white teeth floating in a blood-red background. A splash of magenta paint on a blue door hovers above a head-and-shoulders portrait of a beautiful girl against a blur of neon lights and shadowy buildings.
As with the black and white work, there are recurring motifs: curving metal tubing or pipes, meshes or fabrics, the garish shopfronts and signage of night-time Shinjuku and a handful of snatched portraits of its people (a stocky man’s shaved head and single braid, a blond youth sitting on the pavement immersed in texting, a homeless man lying asleep or comatose on a cobbled road). All the while, unreal faces stare down from hoardings and backlit billboards promising another tantalisingly out-of-reach lifestyle built on brands and labels, the impossible lure of fashion and fame.
Neon world … Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color … 2008-2015.
Neon world … Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color … 2008-2015. Photograph: Courtesy the artist
Shinjuku is still there in its primary colours, a living, writhing monster
The Shinjuku of today is a distant echo of the politically radical place that first fired the young Moriyama’s imagination in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, it still exerts a grip on his imagination as he enters old age. He shoots it, he says in his poetic catalogue essay, because “it is still there in its primary colours, a living, writhing monster”.
Perhaps that is a testament to the power of memory: the new work, for all its shift in tone, seems haunted by the old. “The reason I return to certain places is somehow related to memories, yes, but it is more an unconscious thing,” he says, moving towards a busy photograph of an uninviting milk bar, its peeling facade and stained awning overlooking a jumble of forlorn plants and plastic outdoor furniture. “It’s just a cafe on a dirty corner,” he says, “but it is also an emotional image for me because it says something about the atmosphere of the city. I can smell the cafe and the coffee. I can smell the whole picture.”
City grid … Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color … 2008-2015
City grid … Daido Moriyama, Tokyo Color … 2008-2015 Photograph: Courtesy the artist
Moriyama, now 77, has long dyed hair and a fashionably bohemian look, suggesting an artist defiantly staring down encroaching mortality. His drive seems relentless. He has made tens of thousands of images and hundreds of publications since he published his most iconic and provocative book, Farewell Photography, in 1972. That is a hell of a long goodbye, but he shows no signs of mellowing. “When I am shooting, I do not slow down the pace,” he says, smiling, when I mention this. “It is exactly the same – keep going, keep going.”
Would he accept that he is obsessive even by photography standards? A long pause. “Well, I would say there are two opposing parts of my character: the obsessive part and the part that is not. I am made of both aspects. But, really, I have no quiet, calm part of me. I feel this unstoppable energy as a kind of turmoil with in me. I have no concept of photography as a static practice.”
He looks around and gestures at the work. “I do not want to sound too profound, but photography for me is about that energy . It is also a way to get closer to the unconscious self. When I am shooting, I am not completely conscious of the world around me, but I am always reacting to something within myself. It is from here [he taps his heart] rather than from here [he taps his head]. There are no other deep reasons for this work except feeling and emotion.”
Daido Tokyo is at Fondation Cartier, Paris, until 5 June
L’esposizione Daido Tokyo alla Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, a Parigi, inaugura il 6 febbraio. Scatti spregiudicati, in una mostra-evento dedicata al giapponese Daido Moriyama, maestro dell'obiettivo tra i più originali del Novecento.
Duecentocinquanta opere famose sono presentate accanto a inediti e sperimentazioni cromatiche, per una galleria di capolavori che ritrae la vita nei sobborghi di Tokyo. «Il bianco e nero esprime il mio mondo interiore, il colore descrive ciò che incontro senza filtri», racconta.
Fortemente influenzato dalla Beat Generation, Moriyama ha fatto della strada il suo teatro di ricerca, perché «ogni scorcio o sguardo sono degni di essere fotografati senza distinzioni o gerarchie», spiega.
Per lui, infatti, la finalità non è documentare, ma cogliere frammenti di quotidiano e renderli eterni. Così, negli anni ha accumulato migliaia di immagini dalle inquadrature sempre anticonvenzionali, sia nella scelta dei soggetti sia nella forma.
Pezzo dopo pezzo svelano il Giappone postbellico: un Paese saturo di contraddizioni, che vive in bilico fra tradizione e modernità e da quell’incontro trova linfa creativa: «La realtà proiettata davanti ai miei occhi è quasi tutta un mistero, che vale la pena di indagare».
Dove: Daido Tokyo, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Parigi, dal 6 febbraio al 29 maggio 2016.
scritto da Benedetta Bernasconi
Daido Moriyama. Daido Tokyo, du 6 février au 5 juin 2016, à la Fondation Cartier pour l’Art contemporain, 261, boulevard Raspail, 75014 Paris, Métro Raspail ou Denfert-Rochereau. 01 42 18 56 67, tous les jours sauf le lundi de 11 à 20h, mardi jusqu’à 22h. 10,50 ou 12,10€ en ligne, tarif réduit 7 (ou 8,60€ en ligne) sur fondation.cartier.com. Gratuit aux moins de 13 ans, au moins de 18 ans le mercredi.
