In the last post I mentioned going to the Daido Moriyama show at the photographers gallery. Being interested in Street photography I had a passing knowledge of his work but not in the same vine as people like Joel Meyerowitz, Saul Leiter and Robert Frank.
As it was a retrospective there was a lot of work on show. Not only images but some of the 150 books that he has published.
One of the books that caught my attention was Labyrinth, a book dedicated to his contact prints. I love seeing photographers contact prints and how they have gone about working the scene to get the final image.
Moriyama’s technique for shooting his images was to use small compact cameras like the Ricoh GR series and Kodak Tri-X pushed to 1600. This helped to get the high contrast, grainy images he was looking for and more manipulation was done in the darkroom. We can see this by looking at the contact sheets.
The following is the blurb from the book’s jacket sleeve. Other than this there is hardly any other text in the book.
Contact sheets ordinarily don't leave the confines of a photographer's studio. They are meant for the photographer's eyes alone-a tool to aid in the hunt for a single frame to enlarge and print. The contact sheets reproduced in this volume, however, no longer serve that purpose. Instead, they offer a means of reconsideration, a vehicle for the photographer Daido Moriyama to review the span of his career and to recompose his work.
The pages of this publication reproduce a series of individual contact sheets that Moriyama has created by mixing together negatives from disparate rolls of film. In a single sheet, work from different periods of his fifty-year-long career are juxtaposed by the artist. Work shot in the 1960s, for example, appears alongside images shot recently. While each sheet has a certain theme, taken as a whole, each individual frame is given equal standing regardless of its chronology or provenance; Moriyama makes little or no distinction between each instance of the shutter's release. Contact-printed negatives of Moriyama's best-known images appear side-by-side with previously unselected and unreleased material, radically flattening the traditional hierarchy of the "masterpiece." Instead, the totality of his work reveals volumes more than singular, isolated images.
By compelling himself to look back through all his existing negatives, Moriyama offers both the viewer and himself a deep immersion into over fifty years' worth of images-a chance to lose oneself in a labyrinth of images, continually moving forward, on an unknown path toward an uncertain destination.
The book was published in 2012 and the copy I have is a softback which runs to around 304 pages of his black & white negatives.
Not all the negatives are 35mm, there is quite a collection of half-frame images which apparently he shot was an Olympus Pen W in New York in 1971, along with a collection of 6x6 images.
The contact sheets give a great insight on how he takes his images, there's no waiting to capture scenes, its all just snap, snap, snap.
I would say that the images are snapshots, fast moving blurred not really having a known purpose, this is especially true for his street photography work and sometimes only 1 or 2 frames.
There are only instances where whole rolls of film have been shot on a self portrait or even more rolls for the series “tights”.
The book is a mishmash of negatives and like Moriyama’s style they do seem to be thrown together. As with most of his work there is very little consistency with what is shot, he is like a magpie, just collecting images and only when the films are processed, does he see what he has.
With 300+ pages and 1000s of frames, this is a book you can come back to many times and find hidden gems that even Moriyama hasn't printed yet.
I dread to think of the cost of all the film he has shot.
Digital is the way to go for his working practice.
I've heard he uses Nik collection to still get the film look on his digital images.
You’re correct that his work seems thrown together and without a clear goal. Nowadays Moriyama shoots with a digital point n shoot, given the cost of film and his shooting style.