Daidŵ Moriyama to the letter

Conference by Jean-Kenta GAUTHIER, a specialist in Japanese photography. A gallery owner and publisher, he sits on the selection committee for galleries at Paris Photo and participates in the Paris Photo and Art Basel fairs. He is the scientific advisor for the exhibition Daidō Moriyama: Love Letters to Phography presented until October 4 at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, curated by Clément Chéroux (director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation) in collaboration with the Daidō Moriyama Photo Foundation.

Jean-Kenta Gauthier proposes a shift in perspective on Daidō Moriyama (born in 1938). Not to dispute the importance of his photographic work, now universally acclaimed, but to highlight a dimension that has remained largely invisible outside Japan: the breadth, continuity, and scope of his written work. Contrary to the simplistic labels often used to summarize him—"pop" or "punk" photographer, chronicler of postwar Japan's transformations, inventor of an aesthetic of grain, blur, and motion blur—this lecture aims to demonstrate that a crucial part of his thought resides in his writings. It is there that Moriyama's images find not their definitive explanation, but a richer, more complex, and more intimate resonance.

Debunking clichés

The idea that Daidō Moriyama "created" the so-called aesthetic in the 1960s air, hole, boke The terms "grainy," "shaky," and "blurry" need to be put into perspective. This approach was widespread in Japanese photographic publications at the time. Similarly, the interpretation of Moriyama as a social photographer, a critic of Japan's economic and political upheavals, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny of his writings. Born in 1938, a child during World War II, Moriyama instead evokes his childhood fascination with American soldiers stationed in Japan; he may have visually documented the transformations of Japanese society, but without adopting a stance of social denunciation.

Even his most famous images need to be placed within a larger context. The stray dog ​​photographed in 1971 in Misawa, in front of an American base, often interpreted as his alter ego, cannot alone encapsulate the artist's entire self-representation. Other figures play this role: a cat, insects, and above all, more profoundly, an absence that pervades the entire body of work.

 An immense and little-known body of written work

While Moriyama is undoubtedly one of the most prolific authors of photography books—more than two hundred, perhaps three hundred volumes—he is also one of the most prolific writers. Dozens of text-based books already exist, in addition to a considerable number of articles and serials initially published in magazines. Yet this part of his work remains almost entirely inaccessible outside of Japan.

The paradox is all the more striking given that Daidō Moriyama now belongs to the international pantheon of photography: Hasselblad Award in 2019, retrospective in London in 2011, presence since 1974 in the exhibition New Japanese Photography at MoMA in New York, works preserved in major institutional collections.

Inu no kioku/Places of my memory (Memoirs of a dog/Places in my memory). Tokyo. Asahi Shimbunsha. 1984.

Shashin Jidai. May 1987.

Shashin yo sayōnara (Farewell to photography). Tokyo. Shashin Hyōronsha. 1972.

However, what the foreign public receives from him remains incomplete because, at the library of the TOP – Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, in the Ebisu district of Tokyo, the books by Moriyama most borrowed by the Japanese public are not his picture books, but his text books.

It is precisely to begin to fill this gap that the volume was designed Love letters to photographyPublished on the occasion of the exhibition presented at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and co-published by the Foundation and Delpire publishers, under the direction of Clément Chéroux. Both a catalogue and a standalone work, it brings together twenty-two texts by Daidō Moriyama, from the 1960s to the present day, constituting the first French anthology of his writings on photography.

An exhibition born from a question of reading

The exhibition currently on display at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation is itself based on this conviction: one cannot fully understand Moriyama without reading his writings. Jean-Kenta Gauthier also points out that the project took shape around a very simple, almost material question. Before Shashin yo sayonara (Farewell to Photography), the great book of 1972, Clément Chéroux asked him what was written on the cover. This seemingly innocuous question actually revealed one of the blind spots in the Western reception of Moriyama: we look at these books without being able to read them.

But the cover of Shashin yo sayonara This already says a lot. It announces that this is the first volume of a collection that the publisher, Shashin Hyōronsha, intended to launch; it also specifies that it will include a conversation between Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, on August 2nd. In other words, this now-legendary book is not only a major photographic work; it is also woven with text.

The paradox is striking. We celebrate Shashin yo sayonara For its jarring images, its accidents, its formal violence, even though it contains dozens of pages of text. Moriyama pushes to its extreme a project of "tabula rasa": he mixes his own photographs with fragments of negatives collected in the darkroom, belonging to other photographers, which he prints and integrates into the book. This "farewell to photography" thus takes the form of a radical questioning of the author, the image, and the very act of photographing.

Thinking about photography from its margins

In the conversation with Takuma Nakahira reproduced in Shashin yo sayonaraThe first subsection bears an unambiguous title: “Disgust and Rejection of Photography.” In it, the two men question the very existence of the fixed image since Nicéphore Niépce, as well as the relationship established by press photography between seeing and being seen. The exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation takes this as its starting point: once we have said goodbye to photography, what do we do? We reinvent it.

It is from this perspective that Jean-Kenta Gauthier invites us to reread certain magazine publications. He begins by showing a series from 1969, taken with a telephoto lens in Tokyo, entitled "Premeditated or Not, Accident Number 4: Blind Spot." The accompanying text likens the camera to a rifle equipped with a scope and describes the photographic act as a targeting of strangers captured in the street. Photography appears here as an operation of aiming, intrusion, and ordeal imposed on others. The commentary is not secondary: it gives the whole series its true tension and reveals how much Moriyama reflects, through writing, on the latent violence of the photographic gaze. Moriyama also evokes the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the rifle equipped with a scope used by its perpetrator.

A second example concerns the famous photographs of legs in tights, often exhibited for their graphic power and erotic charge. Published in 1987 in the magazine Shashin jidai Under the title "How to Take Beautiful Photographs Number 6: Tights in Shimotakaido," they take on a completely different meaning when placed in their context. This series belongs to a serial in which Moriyama mocks precisely what is called "beautiful photography": sunsets, flowers, clouds, optical virtuosity. In the prosperous Japan of the 1980s, where amateur photography was booming and equipment manufacturers were imposing their vision, these images are less about pure eroticism than about a biting irony directed at photographic good taste.

The same shift occurs with another publication ("How to Take Beautiful Photographs Number 4: From a Single Photograph" in the magazine Shashin jidai(March 1987), taken at an intersection in Shinjuku. Moriyama first photographed a street scene, then, back home, photographed details of the print hanging on the wall. The text accompanying the series emphasizes the impossibility, in a snapshot, of capturing every corner of the image. He then reflects on the infinite duplication of photographic detail, even imagining a kind of photographic particle, a passage "to the other side of the image." Jean-Kenta Gauthier connects this idea to Blow-Up of Michelangelo Antonioni and the world behind Lewis Carroll's looking glass. Here again, the text reveals a speculative, almost fantastical imagination, which belies the overly simplistic image of a purely instinctive Moriyama.

A Tale of 11 Cities. END. Paris. 1989

Komoro, Nagado. Japan 1990.

Skyward. Japan Airlines Magazine. November 2008.

The mmemory ofa frabsent era

Jean-Kenta Gauthier puts forward a hypothesis formulated from Memoir ofa dogThis autobiography, initially published as a serial before becoming a bestseller in Japan, was first published as a book in 1984. The first chapter opens with a recollection of Daidō Moriyama's twin brother, Kazumichi, who died very young. Moriyama describes himself as a "copy" of this deceased brother: the character meaning "one" in Kazumichi's name has been replaced by the one that forms the "Dai" in Daidō. Through this minute yet dizzying shift, the writer-photographer inscribes his existence under the sign of the double, of survival, and of substitution.

The text then recounts a return to his birthplace, a neighborhood in Ikeda, near Osaka, and develops a meditation on memory, déjà vu, and the phantom image. Moriyama suggests that his entire life as a walker and photographer is oriented toward an unattainable image: the photograph of his absent brother, the one that was never taken. There is no family portrait uniting the parents and the two children; something is missing from his memory, irreparably.

From this starting point, Jean-Kenta Gauthier offers an interpretation of Moriyama's numerous self-portraits—reflections in mirrors, shadows on the floor, fragmented silhouettes, partially hidden faces—as so many non-narcissistic figures. With Clément Chéroux, he sees in them less an affirmation of self than an exploration of copying, absence, and doubling. If Moriyama constantly photographs himself as a shadow or a reflection, it is perhaps, he suggests, because this already secondary image obscurely refers to the vanished twin brother of whom he is a reincarnation.

The fatherlerinage towards NicNiépce

The second major hypothesis of the conference concerns Daidō Moriyama's relationship with Nicéphore Niépce. A central section of the exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation is devoted to him, in anticipation of the bicentenary of photography celebrated in France in 2026-2027 in commemoration of the Point of view du Gras created by Niépce in 1826-1827. Moriyama discovered a reproduction of it in the 1980s. Point of view du Gras and immediately made it a foundational image, to the point of keeping a poster of this photograph above her bed for years.

This poster became for him both a practical object and an object of veneration. He photographed it compulsively, first as a leader image with film, and later, when inserting a new memory card into a digital camera. Thousands of photographs of this same poster have thus accumulated in the archives of the Daidō Moriyama Photo Foundation. The exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation presents, for the first time, a selection of 36 images.

A poster reproducing Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras (1826-1827), formerly hung above Daido Moriyama's bed.

Ikebukuro. Tokyo. Japan. 2011-2017.

The pilgrimage then takes on a concrete dimension. In 2008, Moriyama traveled to Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, in Burgundy, thanks to Japan Airlines, and photographed the very view of the from Nicéphore Niépce's house. Point of view du GrasLater, in 2015, he traveled to Texas, to the Ransom Center at the University of Austin, where the original plaque is kept.

In a text entitled "Starting Point and Current Point, Journey Towards Niépce," Moriyama states unequivocally that his favorite photograph in all of history is the Point of view du GrasHe sees in it the origin and foundation of all existing photographs. When he recounts his encounter with the plate in Austin, he describes the indefinable emotion he felt before it and concludes: "My pilgrimage to Niépce was coming to an end." Jean-Kenta Gauthier infers from this that the quest for the origin of photography, along with that of the lost brother, constitutes one of the two fundamental axes of his entire work.

A photographic thought in action

The main value of this reading lies in restoring Moriyama's reflective dimension. His texts are not strictly speaking theoretical treatises; they often take the form of a journal, a personal narrative. But it is precisely through this intimate material that they develop a philosophy of photography, of its connection to memory, time, space, copying, and absence. Moriyama is first and foremost a photographer, undoubtedly, but a photographer accompanied throughout his life by writing.

This written work also arose from very concrete constraints. In Japan from the 1960s to the 1980s, where there were few galleries and few institutions dedicated to photography, magazines were an essential means of subsistence for photographers. Moriyama had to regularly provide portfolios, inventing a new project each month; and since his editors had realized that he wrote remarkably well, they also asked him for texts. From this economic necessity emerged a dual body of work, where image and prose develop together.

Jean-Kenta Gauthier hopes that all of Daidō Moriyama's writings will be translated. This body of work, already almost entirely published in Japan in magazines and books, remains largely unknown to foreign readers. Such an undertaking would undoubtedly allow for a more accurate assessment of Moriyama's place in the history of photography: not only as the creator of unforgettable images, but also as a thinker on photography itself, its origins, its illusions, and its shortcomings. In this sense, the exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation is not merely a tribute to a great photographer on the occasion of the Bicentennial of Photography; it opens a new avenue of interpretation, and the publication by Delpire offers a preview with its first anthology of 22 writings.

This obsession is not a matter of anecdotal fetishism. In Memoir ofa dogIn a chapter entitled "The Myth of Light," Moriyama writes that the landscape captured by Nicéphore Niépce constitutes the first memory of a past light. This is not Moriyama's memory, nor Niépce's, but the memory of the world. For Moriyama, this original image is thus not the first photograph in history; it is the "myth of light."