Daido Moriyama. Shinjuku again.

Photographer Daido Moriyama, a Tokyo legend, is currently showing at the Taka Ishii Gallery: a video that has been sitting on the shelves for over 30 years.

poster for Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama "Shinjuku 1973, 25pm"

at Taka Ishii Gallery
in the Kiyosumi, Odaiba area
This event has ended

34 people bookmarked this.
5 people recommend this.

In Reviews by Aneta Glinkowska 2006-08-03 print email

poster for Daido Moriyama It was once rejected by the Shinjuku Ward office as an unsuccessful project on the ward. Entitled Shinjuku 1973, 25pm the video is, clearly, set in Shinjuku. Shot with a shaky handheld camera, the black and white video generally features random scans of the sky and the “city” at night. There are a few barely legible street signs, a couple of neon lights and the roar of motorcycles, making it a very subjective work.

The video is being screened along with a series of color slides, projected on another of the gallery’s walls. The slides are, typically for Moriyama, images of female nudes: young women undressing, street photography and landscapes, but all seem to have been taken in more recent years. Due to the lack of people’s faces in the video, one almost finds oneself glancing at the the stills of various naked butt cheeks in the slides and mentally pasting them into the old Shinjuku Ward video as faces. A great juxtaposition.

Aneta Glinkowska

Aneta Glinkowska. Born in Poland. She has lived in New York since 1996, where she attended college and graduate school. To escape the routine of science labs in college, she went to the movies daily. Following an MA in Cinema Studies, she roams Tokyo as a writer, visiting art galleries daily and blogging about art events. She's looking for opportunities to write about art and cinema for all types of publications. Contact via email: aneta [at] tokyoartbeat [dot ]com. » See other writings

Comments

  1. ivy watkins
    2007-11-28

    good choice of words for daido typical. he was a potentially interesting photographer back in the day but has gone on to adopt the araki strategy of “greatness” because i tell you so. With a book nearly always in print for the 2 photographers who can hold out longer? the critics and curators or time? fueled by sales of sanctified porn where the wives, mothers and girlfriends of interested menfolk are unable to clearly debate the merits of art versus porn, it is a simple middle-ground that many hacks adapt to sell their works. Daido seemed to be searching for something to latch onto or hunting for some greater meaning and “Light” but early on along the way he lost track and kept searching and ignoring whatever he “found” he is predictable and overall a poor choice of photographic heros. Can many people name any 5 distinct images of his that are not on a book cover? (for either of them?) has any one seen the pictures of Kobo Abe at Wildenstein Gallery or its book? would it not be nice to actually evaluate the work and the IDEAS involved in the pieces other than the cult of personality or the buzz of the aura around the works? What was he trying to get at, Atget? :P

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