shashasha

Issue no. 42 of Daido Moriyama’s ongoing “Record” series is further proof that the master’s photographic vision has not faded since his debut works in the 1960s. With his snaps from the streets of Tokyo – glimpses of interesting characters, street portraits, detail shots, moody cityscapes etc. – Moriyama expresses his daily experience and vision of the Japanese capital. The concluding essay (in Japanese and English translation) at the back of the book sees Moriyama reminisce about his beginnings.

“Again years later, when I had just moved to Tokyo in reliance on Eikoh Hosoe, I would spend night after night roaming the streets of Shinjuku, which was right in the middle between my workplace in Kojimachi and my lodge in Kamikitazawa, and while my idea of taking snaps was still somewhat hazy, I kept pointing my camera at couples (which we fashionably called “avecs” at the time…) on the move in the city at night […]
Anyway, all the various photographs I’ve talked about above, they are all gone, vanished altogether, disappeared to who knows where. There are neither negatives nor prints left of them, so it’s all only in my memory.”
— from Daido Moriyama’s afterword