New York - A Daido Moriyama walk

Went to see the Moriyama/Klein photography exhibition at the Tate Modern recently and was interested in Daido Moriyama's record of his first trip to New York in 1971 and his resulting black and white photobook.



In 1971, on his first trip out of Japan, Moriyama approached his New York stay with a fair amount of anxiety. Walking the streets of the city with his half-frame camera, Moriyama’s images resonate with a rawness inspired by Klein, yet synthesized and absorbed through a distinctly postwar Japanese Existentialism. With the book as the primary mode of distribution for Japanese photographers, Moriyama knew that a publication would be the final format for his New York images. Intentionally pushing the boundaries and limitations of traditional image framing, Moriyama’s ’71 New York images, like Klein’s, are dark, crowded and unsettling.  Mostly shot on the streets, in his Chelsea hotel room, in deserted hallways or under the glare of subway lighting, the overall impression from Moriyama’s photographs is one of intense contradictions as they depict a New York slipping into the social and economic decay of the 1970s.

I set off on a Situationist-inspired walk - using a Tokyo map and a predetermined route - with a black and white setting on my camera and a Moriyama 1971 mindset.