We posted recently about Daido Moriyama’s prolific work as a street photographer in Japan. New York’s Yoshii Gallery is hosting an upcoming exhibition of Moriyama’s unpublished gelatin prints, taken between 1975 and 1978.
The gallery writes:
During the 1960s and 1970s, Japan was thrust into the postmodern era without having achieved a mature stage of modernity, pursuing industrialized and consumer capitalism while the development of its mass media continued to accelerate. The Tokyo landscape was suddenly and drastically altered – mechanically reproduced images, piles of neatly stacked merchandise, highly stylized women in overtly sexual advertisements, and the loneliness of the “modern man” were everyday scenes from the city’s utopian vision for economic and cultural progress. The primary method for reproducing this profusion of posters, magazines and billboards was the halftone printing process, where a screen of small dots (“mesh”) are printed in layers to produce color images. This world, saturated in images, is Moriyama’s Meshed World. Moriyama’s photos show optimistic advertisements depicting images of Western celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, borrowed and stylized to the point where they begin to taken on Japanese anime features. However, sinister feelings of boredom and loneliness lurk in the shadows of these bright lights and excitement for the pursuit of change and economic growth. By weaving visual gossamer and transforming objects into amorphous patterns, Moriyama takes these scenes even further – transcending boredom and nihilism, and escaping the emptiness of the everyday.
