Daido Moriyama colors his black and whites

Moriyama is one of his generation’s most influential and renowned photographers. Since he began working in the 1960s, the artist has used photography to subvert conservative conventions of the medium, setting forth a more subjective style.

Daido Moriyama wanders around the streets and dark alleys of Tokyo and clicks with the speed of lightning. There is hardly any pause or contemplation, just a razor-sharp eye that quickly decides to grab that moment and make it his own. His weapon of choice is a regular, compact camera. An innocuously simple gadget that puts him on stealth-mode as he documents the deep, dark, yearnings of the city and its people. Moriyama has been roaming the streets for over 50 years photographing Tokyo’s sinuous trail of desires. His style is considered to go against the grain of what legends like Henri Cartier Bresson advocated about the magic of the ‘decisive moment’. Moriyama’s images happen in split seconds, on-the-go, not in wait for the image to reveal itself. Erotic, sensual with a voyeuristic energy, his images are unique in the way they drill down the shiny veneer of the city to bring out its underbelly.

His oeuvre has been in creating gritty, black and white images and the new show features some of those early images in color bringing out a different experience. Tokyo Color highlights Moriyama’s long engagement with color photography, featuring a slideshow of his early explorations with color film, alongside a series of his recent color prints. While best known for his high-contrast black and white images, color photography has been an integral part of his practice since the 1970s. Moriyama says, “The black and white tells about my inner worlds, my emotions and deep feelings that 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 nature. The second one is polite, gentle, as I set myself towards the world.” The images on view, all taken in the artist’s hometown of Tokyo, convey Moriyama’s ongoing fascination with his urban environment, and his practice of compulsively collecting impressions of the city’s vibrancy, as well as its vulgarities.

The exhibition also presents a selection of Moriyama’s iconic black and white “tights” portraits, a subject that the artist has continually revisited since his first series in the 1980s. The photographs focus on a woman’s legs in fishnets, erotically depicting the accentuation of the netting over the curves of the body. Closely cropped, these black and white images are studies in patterns, light and shadow, and form. The body of work highlights Moriyama’s interest in intrigue and seduction, themes that motivate the artist’s practice, and are also intrinsic to his photographs of Tokyo’s streets.