For the longest time I struggled to find an affinity for Daido Moriyama’s work. It feels odd or unsettling to say that out loud, but much of it left me cold.
The way he works feels reminiscent of mid-century automatism, (the intent to make work, with as little conscious thought as possible), walking and snapping, stopping and snapping, all the while trying to take inspiration from what he sees through the viewfinder, and doing so with apparently as little input from his conscious mind as possible.
His belief in snapshot photography, and the art worlds’ appreciation for it has always left me feeling confused, stupid, and like an outsider.
As someone that holds photography sacrosanct and believes in both in its ability to communicate, and my authorship of that communication, his approach seems almost… disrespectful.
My vain attempts to do something with photography feel doubly impotent when confronted with someone who snaps lots of pictures and finds a truth in the test prints afterwards.
And yet he does find a truth.
Doublethink
I read this book in the run up to starting the course because I felt I ought to be reading about work I don’t like as well as work that I do.
Now that I’ve read it and gone back to his work again, I’ve found more of an appreciation for it, and I now feel challenged by my initial dislike.
It’s confounding to note that if two photographers were to independently create the same photograph, through very different workflows, I might like one of them more, for the deliberation in its construction. (I would have to know which was which of course).
As someone who espouses often on the idea that it is the “image that matters” this is a hypocrisy.
I’ve engaged as best I can with Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’, and so find the idea that both intention and truth can be found in the apparent chaos of Moriyama’s workflow a hard square to circle.
While there are many photographers whose work fails to move me, I’m unaware of any other photographer that I’ve disregarded on the basis of the way they make their images as opposed to the images themselves.
Pangs of recognition
Moriyama talks of the envy he feels for the streets he has to pass on his way somewhere, when he is unable to stop and take pictures.
“…I catch sight of of these nameless towns… just glimpses of the streets as I go by, in the train or the car, and I feel that surge of envy. I get the compulsion to stop, get out, walk around, take some shots. This obsession with streets that I don’t know starts to take over. That’s really the only kind of “sentiment” that I feel when I travel.“
I know that envy, although I know it as a melancholia that comes from not being able to stop, to not make the apposite image in a given place.
Daido Moriyama – How I take photographs
Takeshi Nakamoto
Lawrence King 2019