Provoking a Farewell to Photography: The Aesthetic of Moriyama Daido’s Early Photobooks and Magazine Work (1965-1978)

This dissertation examines the aesthetic of the early work of Japanese photographer Moriyama Daido (b. 1938), published in photobooks and photography magazines between 1965 and 1978. During those years, Moriyama’s photography was characterized by a visual language that has been dubbed are-bure-boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus), a term initially coined by Japanese photography critics in the late 1950s to describe William Klein’s (1926-2022) gritty photographs of New York. This unorthodox aesthetic resulted from Moriyama’s unique conceptual attitude that rejected definitions of good or bad and any preconceived biases towards the outcome of his artistic work. He also approached photography with great physicality (movement) and used the medium to express his visual experience of reality. The formal analysis of his earliest publications revealed a distinctly deconstructive methodology aimed at questioning (and highlighting) the limits of photography. Subsequent work, published during the 1970s, was, in contrast, considerably less experimental, more self-reflective, and predominantly based on previously successful ideas to consolidate a mature style. Nevertheless, Moriyama presented photography consistently as a product of the artistic process rather than a supposedly objective window to the world. The unusual degrees of blurriness, graininess, and contrast of the are-bure-boke aesthetic were ideal for emphasizing the artificiality and materiality of the printed images in his photobooks and magazine work, resulting in a perplexing disruption of the familiar experience of looking at photography. This concept was taken to its extreme with the reproduction of damaged film negatives in his book Farewell Photography (1972). Consequently, when confronted with Moriyama’s early work, the viewer’s eyes are constantly drawn away from the photographic subject to the physicality of the photographic reproduction. Moriyama’s frequent use of heavy black ink, stark contrast, and full-bleed layouts further helped promote this aesthetic of visual disruption, materiality, and physicality. This thesis coined the term associative pairing to describe Moriyama’s unique strategy of image sequencing in making his photobooks or magazine work. This strategy establishes semantic relationships between disparate images by juxtaposing photographs depicting comparable movements and objects or similar compositions. Moriyama’s early work was driven by a deep fascination and critical engagement with concepts such as voyeurism, nostalgia, and contingency, as well as photography and its complex relationship with reality.