Daido Tokyo

Looking at a collection of photographs by Daido Moriyama is like hurtling through the city in a cab, spinning your head from side to side, up and down, to take in all the action. And the action doesn’t stop with the click of Moriyama’s shutter. As critic Patrick Remy notes in his introduction, “He endlessly plunges into his contact prints, tirelessly reprints his images, re-centers them, prints them horizontally or vertically to achieve the desired format at the time… enough to make you lose yourself in the maelstrom of his photos (his complete works list 5,758 references).” Close-ups of red, red lips and meticulously manicured hands (except for a bandage on the index finger—what happened?), snowy cityscapes, lonely hotel rooms, storefronts, beautiful women and a pig—no subject escapes him. Like Atget, whom he admires, Moriyama freezes urban evanescence, and like Hosoe, whom he assisted, he uncovers the intimate.