Daidō Moriyama: dark Tokyo and sultry nudes

On October 13th 2019, Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama, 81 years old, will go to Göteborg, on Sweden’s West coast to be given his trophy: the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. This reward is given every year, since 1980, to a well-known photographer to praise his entire work. The Hasselblad Center (Sweden) will also host a new exhibition by Daidō Moriyama. The artist joins the circle of photographers already honoured by the institution: Irving Penn (1985), Richard Avedon (1991), Hiroshi Sugimoto (2001), Malick Sidibé (2003), David Goldblatt (2006), Nan Goldin (2007), Wolfgang Tillmans (2015)…

He is best known for his wide-angle images of Tokyo, in a dark black and white, almost dirty, inappropriate. But Daidō Moriyama also distinguished himself, between 1969 and 1972, in erotic nude photography by participating in the visual and cultural revolution embodied by the Japanese magazine Provoke. Typical Japanese bondage scenes, strangely relocated in nature, various positions of an anonymous female body, on a bed, in a bathroom… In these natural poses, the voyeuristic dimension fades away and gives way to a feeling of relaxed, soothed and assumed intimacy, which contrasts all the more with the legendary Japanese modesty: a solar and non-demonic eroticism, purged of all forms of guilt and perversion. By reinventing the erotic nude, Daidō Moriyama draws the portrait of a society in identity crisis, which tries to find its own modernity by distancing itself from the shackles of its traditions on the one hand, and the mirages of the American dream on the other. The photographer identifies the relationship to the body as a central issue in this upheaval.