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.

Aneta Glinkowska

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

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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.

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