Daido Moriyama | Vintage prints from the 80's

Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present Daido Moriyama | Vintage Prints from the 80s from Saturday, March 16 to Saturday, April 13. Moriyama's 19th solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery and his first in four years, the exhibition will feature 18 vintage prints produced in the 1980s.
In 1972, Moriyama published the photo book Farewell Photography, which represented a zenith of the iconoclastic photographic style characterized as are, bure, boke (rough, blurred, and out-of-focus). However, he subsequently fell into a slump as he wrestled with an uncertain relationship to his artistic medium. In 1981 Moriyama embarked on a series titled Light and Shadow which was serialized in the magazine. These works depicting everyday subjects such as flowers, cars, and street signs were compiled into a photo book of the same name the following year, and won the Photographer of the Year Award from The Photographic Society of Japan. In 1982 and 1983, Moriyama's series Memories of a Dog ran in Asahi Camera, and the photographs were accompanied by his autobiographical texts. In 1987 he published the photo book Journey to Nakaji, a tribute to fellow photographer and Osaka native Nakaji Yasui. Seeking to re-examine the essence of photography and reconnect with the medium, Moriyama published Lettre à St. Lou in 1990, expanding on the themes of Light and Shadow and exploring the techniques of one of the fathers of photography, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Moriyama also ventured into new collaborative territory, teaming up with the fashion brand Hysteric Glamour on the project Daido hysteric. In this exhibition, we invite you to appreciate Moriyama's prints from the 1980s, a crucial phase in the career of one of Japan's acknowledged masters of photography.

Photo: Daido Moriyama, "Memory of Dog 3", 1982, gelatin silver print, 23.3 x 33.5 cm © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film