![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/4-1230x922.jpg\")
50 years on, Daido Moriyama’s photographs remain unsettled and alive
\n\n\n\nDaido Moriyama has always worked at the threshold of clarity and collapse: a flash of a recognisable subject, then blur; a figure halfseen, a shadow overtaking the page. This latest photobook republishes four landmark series from the late 1960s and early 80s – Japan, A Photo Theater, A Hunter, Farewell Photography and Light and Shadow – as a sequence that reads like a fevered rehearsal of all that photography can do when stripped of certainty.
\n\n\n\nMark Holborn’s introductory essay offers both historical compass and provocation. He reminds us that these photographs were made half a century ago yet insists they are newly ‘imbued with nostalgia’. But what does it mean for a photograph to be nostalgic? Holborn suggests it’s found in the depiction of something vanished – a demolished street, a fading community. But nostalgia can also reside in texture, in the graininess and high-contrast black-and-white images that indelibly mark out Moriyama’s style. Moriyama’s more recent work, such as in the ongoing and diaristic everyday snapshots published in his magazine Record, feel just as haunted, their (albeit crisper) imagery no less tethered to memory.
\n\n\n\nHolborn’s historical account is pragmatic: Moriyama’s early years in postwar Japan; the aesthetic inheritance of ukiyo-e woodblock printing and the gestural traditions of Japanese theatre forms; the encouragement of figures like Eikoh Hosoe and Shoji Yamagishi, who helped usher in a new generation of photographers unshackled from the older documentary genre. Moriyama’s photography, Yamagishi observed, was ‘wholly subjective’, guided by an instinctive, wandering eye.
\n\n\n\nQuartet opens with Japan, A Photo Theater, images that straddle performances of varying sorts – sex shows, marching bands, kabuki – and everyday life. A blurred figure squats in an alley, apparently peeing into a drain; the face of a woman peers out from the shadow behind a door; an ancient battle is reenacted on stage; bottles hold human foetuses. Then there is A Hunter, for which Moriyama takes to the streets. Stray dogs, blurred traffic, naked women and closeup shots of bodies both clothed and naked. Images snatched in haste, they contain a predatory energy. Here, sight is the means of giving chase.
\n\n\n\nFarewell Photography marks a more radical break in form and subject, the photograph’s surface dismantled. Scratched negatives, overexposures and cropped frames make images almost illegible. A smudge of light might be a face or a landscape; a smear of black might be the trace of a moving car – this is photography in the process of undoing itself. Finally, Light and Shadow strips the image back so that contrast is the subject. Here we see the black hollow of an eye, the camera’s flash highlighting the geometry of a toilet bowl, the candyfloss texture of clouds against a grainy darkening sky. It is an austere collection of photographs – pared back and emotionally stilled.
\n\n\n\nShort, previously published texts by Moriyama read as deliberately flat and matter-of-fact. He has long maintained that words ought not to explain photographs; rather, images should ‘provoke’ language. The most apt words in Quartet come from graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, who worries over the difficulty in writing about the photographer’s work without slipping into adulation: ‘I’m in trouble. It was so easy to say “OK” when he called, but now I don’t know how to say anything properly. I feel as though I’ve lost my power of speech.’ His essay, half praise, half hesitation, captures what Moriyama’s photographs so often induce in viewers: a stuttering awareness that the image has outpaced language.
\n\n\n\nTo look at these photographs 50 years on is not so much about sensing how little they have aged, but rather about looking again, at what might be described as Moriyama’s language of estrangement. They remain encounters in passing – quick, unsettled and alive.
\n\n\n\nDaido Moriyama: Quartet edited by Mark Holborn. Thames & Hudson, £65 (hardcover in slipcase)
\n\n\n\nFrom the Autumn 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
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