The publication of 'Quartet' by Thames & Hudson brings together four of Daido Moriyama's earliest and most influential photography books in a single volume: 'Japan: A Photo Theater,' 'A Hunter,' 'Farewell Photography,' and 'Light and Shadow.' This comprehensive collection raises fundamental questions about what makes Moriyama's photographic work so compelling and enduring in the art world.
The fascination with Moriyama's photography cannot be reduced to mere symptoms of post-World War II defeated Japan, nor should his distinctive style be interpreted simply as a symbol of Tokyo's explosive urban dynamism. Moriyama stands as a complete artist in his own right, not merely a historical-social construction or manifestation of a cultural phenomenon. He has described himself as a 'hunter with a camera,' though he omits the crucial detail that he is simultaneously the prey.
The sense of being a fugitive permeates Moriyama's work not as an echo or inflection waiting to be discerned and traced, but as genuine distress, a state of being that forms both the substance and structure of his photography. For years, Moriyama himself fled from the career he had chosen, becoming disillusioned, withdrawn, and hiding from his own terrors. His friend Tadanori Yokoo, writing a short essay in 'Quartet,' recalls how Moriyama's face would light up when dreaming of retiring from the spotlight to create a small printing press and darkroom 'somewhere like Hokkaido.'
Unlike the despair that playwright Anton Chekhov evokes in his stories of small-town life, Moriyama's self-reflective horror doesn't stem from the perceived banality and inertia of provincial existence. Instead, it expresses the self's perception of itself as a subject fleeing its own existence, haunted by its own ghost. This concept finds resonance in French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's descriptions of the subject (S) as excluded. Like someone banned from a club they desperately want to join, the subject remains isolated and apart, not a substantial object fully assimilated into the symbolic order that seeks to provide us with a sense of integrated selfhood.
For Lacan, there exists an impossibility at the heart of our identity that divides the subject between its appearance and the void at the center of its being. This division isn't between appearance and some hidden substantial foundation, but rather the troubling realization that the self is nothing other than its own inaccessibility, its own failure to be anything beyond essential lack—a nothingness, a non-whole, where there should be something substantial.
This interpretation illuminates the frantic, anguished, self-exiled human figures that populate Moriyama's street photography. They are constantly in motion, never lingering; when passive, typically only images of body parts are seen at rest. The rest of the time, they cast agitated glances as if searching for the meaning of survival. Even the stray dog photographed in 'A Hunter' adopts a questioning pose. In one shot of travelers in a subway car from 'Farewell Photography,' handles hang above them like nooses; fugitives from consciousness, they are arrested and condemned.
This restlessness evokes empathy in viewers who recognize themselves in the disordered behaviors and blurred, raw images of faces hungry with lack. For Lacan, desire itself is lack, making these figures not predators but victims. Moreover, no clear etiology can be sought or applied to explain this condition. While placing Moriyama within the conflicted cultural context of Japan emerging from war and atomic bombs is necessary, it cannot fully explain his approach to photography.
Certain aspects of Moriyama's visual style can be found in film noir—those American films from before World War II continuing into the 1950s. Despite vastly different historical contexts, there's a common preoccupation with using strong contrasts of shadow and light to create unease, adopting irregular shooting angles, and intentional asymmetry. For Moriyama, this approach reaches its climax with 'Farewell Photography,' where belief in the camera as a means of representing reality, or belief in a representable reality, approaches self-destruction.
The moments of the present are so perishable, so ephemeral, that they struggle to be grasped before disappearing. Moriyama, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' feels the urgency to 'hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.' During the ten years following 'Farewell Photography,' Moriyama seems to have reincarnated the human figures he had previously photographed in the streets and rooms of Tokyo neighborhoods that so attracted him.
These were lean years, discreet and minimalist—a period of creative and personal crisis. When he emerged from this phase, his photographic concerns had evolved significantly. Few people and no neighborhood bars populate 'Light and Shadow,' and the images have lost the dark and sinister element that characterized his earlier work. The subjects have an empirical and muscular quality—a motorcycle headlight, a viaduct, bicycle wheels, machine parts—now blurred and spectral in a universe of dark shadows.
What remains unchanged is the brutal confrontation between light and non-light. When light triumphs, it takes the form of a sparkling sink or a urinal happily liberated from Duchampian artifice. The mundane possesses its own theatricality, not alien but rather a tonic to disenchantment. This evolution demonstrates Moriyama's continuous exploration of photography's fundamental tensions between documentation and artistic expression, between reality and its representation.
The 440-page 'Moriyama: Quartet,' edited by Mark Holborn and published by Thames & Hudson, features 250 illustrations in a 29.5 x 21.7 cm format. This comprehensive collection offers readers and photography enthusiasts an unprecedented opportunity to examine the evolution of one of Japan's most significant contemporary photographers, whose work continues to influence street photography and artistic documentation worldwide.
