 |
|
|
 |
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||
 |
|
Although Moriyama's work is well known in Japan where he is one of the country's major photographers, his photography has only been sporadically and incompletely exhibited outside Japan, and it has not received the full critical attention it so richly deserves. Born in the port city of Osaka in 1938, Moriyama turned to photography at the age of twenty-one and moved to Tokyo to work with the eminent photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Early in his career, Moriyama became acquainted with the work of both William Klein and Andy Warhol. He appreciated their new vision and transformed it through his own personal perspective. The energy and dynamic modernity Moriyama found in the emotional, even hostile pictures Klein made of his native New York intrigued the young Japanese photographer, as did the perception of a voyeuristic media culture in Warhol's work. |
|
||
| Daido Moriyama Shibuya 1967 Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 x 9 in. (17.2 x 22.9 cm) Collection of the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics |
||
|
|
|
|
|||
| Moriyama's pictures are taken
in the streets of Japan's major cities. Made with a small, hand-held camera,
they reveal the speed with which they were snapped. Often the frame is tilted
vertiginously, the grain pronounced, and the contrast emphasized. Among
his city images are those shot in underlit bars, strip clubs, on the streets
or in alleyways, with the movement of the subject creating a blurred suggestion
of a form rather than a distinct figure. His most known picture, Stray Dog, (1971) -- after which the exhibition is titled -- is clearly taken on the run, in the midst of bustling, lively street activity. The representation of the alert, wandering, solitary, but ultimately mysterious animal, is a powerful expression of the vital outsider. It is an essential reflection of Moriyama's presence as an alert outsider in his own culture. The largest body of work in the exhibition dates from the first two decades of Moriyama's creative production: the 1960s and 1970s, a period of great political and social upheaval in many parts of the world. Moriyama's photography was also part of this intense period in Japanese art. Much of the work produced in Japan in theater, film, literature, art, and photography appears radical today as it represented a clear disjunction from the past. Japanese artistic production of the 1960s and 1970s was deeply affected by the American occupation and its conflicting messages of democracy and control, of peaceful coexistence, and of the strong American presence in Asia during the Vietnam War. Radical artists, including Moriyama, sought a firm break with the highly regulated Japanese society that was responsible for the war, as well as an affirmation of the vitality of a pre-modern culture that was specifically Japanese. Thus, the pictures Moriyama took of the American Navy base Yokosuka -- reflecting the freedom he saw there -- and the stray dog near the Air Force base at Misawa acknowledge both the liberating newness of the modern experience and its rawness. In the early 1980s, his work moved away from the ambiguity and graininess of his earlier photographs toward a bleaker, more distinct vision, as evidenced in the Light and Shadow series and in the Polaroids and photographs from Osaka, the latest works presented in the exhibition. After its premiere at SFMOMA, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog will travel to other North American and European venues. A film series, Between Two Worlds: Selected Postwar Japanese Films, will accompany the exhibition. This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which is available at the MuseumStore. To order please call 415/357.4035 or email museumstore@sfmoma.org. |
 |
|
This exhibition is supported by the Mondrian Foundation Amsterdam, supporting the visual arts, design, and museums; by the Prins Bernhard Fonds in Amsterdam, supporting visual arts, literature, music, theater, humanities, cultural education, nature conservation, and the preservation of monuments; and by the Netherland-America Foundation. Copyright © 1996-2008 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 
|
