The Carla Sozzani Gallery presents the exhibition daido moriyama in Color, from Sunday 8 November 2015 on Sunday 10 January 2016, curated by Filippo Maggia. “Black and white tells my inner world, the deepest emotions and feelings that I experience every day walking the streets of Tokyo or other cities, like an aimless wanderer. Color describes what I encounter without filters, and I like to record it as it appears to my eyes.
The first is full of contrasts, it's harsh, it fully reflects my solitary nature. The second is kind, considerate, as I place myself towards the world.” Hiromichi (Daido) Moriyama, born in Ikeda, Osaka prefecture, in 1938, thus distinguishes his photographic production in the video interview that introduces the exhibition. Appreciated all over the world for his scathing, often grainy and overexposed black and white photography, from the end of the XNUMXs he established himself first in Japan and subsequently internationally, as the first truly revolutionary look at Japanese society.
1969 is the year in which Moriyama publishes the story of a night with a lover in a hotel room in the Provoke magazine "Eros", and the series entirely made in an Aoyama drug store while youth protests were raging outside. Today, fifty years later, Moriyama presents his work in color at the Galleria Carla Sozzani. Daido Moriyama in Color brings together for the first time a selection of 130 unpublished photographs, taken between the late XNUMXs and early XNUMXs, the decisive years in which Moriyama's training took place.
The street, the favorite theater of the Japanese photographer, is the central theme of the work of those years, a particular historical period for Japan which, after the reconstruction and the economic boom following the end of the Second World War, found itself living and facing the American occupation and then the student protest, in the wake of what was happening in Europe and the United States. Fascinated by the experiences of the beat generation and in particular by reading Jack Kerouac's masterpiece "On the Road", the thirty-year-old Moriyama then begins his solitary and interminable journey, an endless journey narrated by images. Images of a country that lives in the balance between tradition and modernity, of which Moriyama through unconventional photographs, in subjects as in form - according to the dictates launched by Provoke for which what matters is "the experience of a moment" - tries to stealing significant fragments of reality, using the camera in an anarchic way. The most extreme shots of him were collected in the volume Farewell Photography published in 1972.
In addition to the road, to the dark and narrow alleys that still today hide just behind the main arteries that cross Tokyo, in addition to the clubs, whether they are ryokans, pachinko parlors or night clubs, to the portraits of large-engined American cars and motorcycles, to the shots of the posters of American and European stars, the female nudes stand out in the exhibition characterized by the pop and acid colors typical of those years, but delicate, naive in their natural sensuality. Daido Moriyama has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Among these, Tate Modern in London, MoMA in San Francisco, Metropolitan Museum in New York, Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Fondation Cartier in Paris. The exhibition is accompanied by a volume published by Skira, with over 250 color photographs edited by Filippo Maggia.
The exhibition, created by Carla Sozzan Galleryi in collaboration with Modena Photography Foundation, will be in Modena in March 2016.
