on the city of Tokyo, in particular on
his own neighborhood in the Shinjuku
district. Defamiliarizing items from
everyday life, he photographs faded
posters, reflections in shop windows,
odd-shaped pipes, the faces of
people passing in the street. Rather
than carefully selecting and framing
his images, he shoots freely without
looking through the viewfinder, using
his body more than his eyes to capture
reality. Blurred and askew, the resultant
photographs are characterized by haste,
a “snapshot aesthetic” favored by the
artist. Breaking with the convention of
the carefully composed image, Daido
Moriyama invents a powerful and
remarkably expressive visual language
that conveys the sense of a disordered
urban reality.
COLOR
In the 1970s, Daido Moriyama began
experimenting with color photography,
an interest that grew with the arrival
of the digital camera. By the early
2000s,he was mainly shooting in color,
and then converting the photographs
to black and white. From 2008 to 2015,
he produced thousands of digital
images, some of which he chose to
keep in color. A large number of these
works are featured in the exhibition
at the Fondation Cartier. In his
photographs, color is not opposed to
black-and-white; the two are instead
complementary. For Moriyama, black
and white images are associated with
the realm of the symbolic, while color
speaks explicitly of reality, of the world
and the people around him when he is
out on the streets of Tokyo: “ The black
and white tells about my inner worlds,
my emotions and deep feelingsthat I feel
every day walking through the streets
of Tokyo or other cities, as a vagabond
aimlessly. The color describes what I
meet without any filters, and I like to
record the instant for the way it looks
to me. The first one is rich in contrast,
is harsh and fully reflects my solitary