postwar JapanArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 13th February – 13th March, 2010

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) 'Nikko Toshogu' 1977 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Hawaii' by Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine, New York, February - March, 2010

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Nikko Toshogu
1977
Gelatin silver print

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) 'Quilt' 1977 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Hawaii' by Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine, New York, February - March, 2010

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Quilt
1977
Gelatin silver print

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) 'Hokkaido' 1978 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Hawaii' by Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine, New York, February - March, 2010

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Hokkaido
1978
Gelatin silver print

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Tono
1974
Gelatin silver print

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first exhibition featuring the work of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies the space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.

Moriyama takes pictures with a small hand-held camera that enables him to shoot freely while walking or running or through the windows of moving cars. Taken from vertiginous angles or overwhelmed by closeups, his blurred images are charged with a palpable and frenetic energy that reveal a unique proximity to his subject matter. Snapshots of stray dogs, posters, mannequins in shop windows, and shadows cast into alleys present the beauty and sometimes-terrifying reality of a marginalised landscape. His anonymous and detached approach enables him to capture the “visible present” made up of accidental and uncanny discoveries as he experiences them.

Moriyama emerged as a photographer in the 1960’s at the tail end of the VIVO collective, a revolutionary and highly influential group of Japanese artists who reexamined the conventions of photography during the tumultuous postwar period. William Klein’s loose, Beat style images of New York City in the 1960s also served as a major turning point for Moriyama, who found inspiration in Klein’s free-form photographic style. Taken by these innovative approaches at home and abroad, Moriyama ultimately went on to forge his own radical style.

Hawaii, Moriyama’s most recent body of work, was produced over a period of three years and presents his distinct perspective on the daily lives of the people living on the islands of Hawaii and Oahu. Returning to the island five times before feeling prepared to shoot these surroundings, Moriyama’s overall approach is purposeful and considered despite his loose and informal style. The series was recently exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and published in a volume by the institution.

Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938. He has had museum shows around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work is part of many major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Getty in Los Angeles.

Press release from the Luhring Augustine website [Online] Cited 24/02/2010 no longer available online

Installation view of the exhibition 'Hawaii' by Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine, New York, February - March, 2010

Installation views of the exhibition Hawaii by Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine, New York, February – March, 2010

A total of 52 black and white photographs, hung in the entry, main gallery, and one of the back rooms. 29 of the images are from the recent Hawaii series, taken / printed between 2007 and 2010…

What if Sander had taken portraits in India or China? (Another recent example of this phenomenon would be Eggleston’s images of Paris, here.) The effect is somewhat like musicians making covers, taking someone else’s songs and making them their own; sometimes the mashup creates something wholly original and unexpected, and sometimes the combination doesn’t quite work.

This exhibit extends this line of thinking, with the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama making pictures of Hawaii, using a group of the artist’s vintage images of Japan as a counterweight for comparison. The older works provide a reminder of Moriyama’s powerful visual vocabulary: dark shadowy images, with skewed off-kilter angles, harsh contrasts, and a rawness that often mixes the gloomy and the menacing. His best images uncover the dark underbelly of the streets, capturing the cultural nuances of Japan in gritty, grainy blackness.

The island life of Hawaii, with its shakas and mellow aloha spirit, presents a surprising challenge for Moriyama: where can a visitor find the brooding or sinister in this paradise? Moriyama does his best to apply his trademark darkness to palm trees and ferns, beaches and hotels, jungles and clouded hills, tourist shops and conch shells, but the overall effect lacks the malignant edginess that haunts his images of Tokyo; he has found some unexpected surface oddities, but the subjects feel a bit too obvious and superficial. Visually, the big prints (roughly 3 by 5 feet) and their shadowy palette make for a jarring view of the easy going, sunny destination, but the subject matter just doesn’t lend itself all that well to deep psychological probing. The real culture of Hawaii is hidden somewhere else, far from the welcoming hula girls, tiki fabrics, and flowers offered to visitors.

Loring Knoblauch. “Daido Moriyama, Hawaii @Luhring Augustine,” on the Collector Daily website, March 4, 2010 [Online] Cited 28/04/2025