MEMORIES OF A DOG
Daido Moriyama
Daido Moriyama: MEMORIES OF A DOG. Tucson, AZ: Nazraeli Press, 2004. First edition [3,000 copies]. Text in English. Octavo. Black paper covered boards titled in black. Printed dust jacket. Black endpapers. 192 pp. 73 black and white plates. Trace of wear to jacket edges, but a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
7 x 10 hardcover book with 73 photographs and text by Daido Moriyama, translated by John Junkerman. Daido Moriyama is without question one of Japan’s most important contemporary photographers and it is not surprising that this memoir, first published as a series of essays in Asahi Camera twenty-one years ago, is regarded as a classic in photographic literature.
In Memories of a Dog, Moriyama approaches photography through language, and it is difficult to say which is the more evocative medium. His vividly expressive prose is in perfect harmony with the grainy, black and white images that in turn have a poetry all their own. As both reader and viewer one becomes completely absorbed, and photographs that will always be remarkable are given a new, very personal, layer of meaning. This is an eloquent autobiographical account of the artist’s progress through life – the places he’s lived and traveled to, the newsreel theater that was like a “second school,” the bars, the coffee shops, and his journey to take his mother’s ashes to be with those of his father.
From his earliest sensations of being, to the realization that he has become “willy-nilly and much to my regret, an adult,” Moriyama shares his idea of memory, and “the individual history that goes by the name, I.”
Daido Moriyama (born 1938 in Ikeda, Japan) invented a new visual language with his work beginning in the mid-1960s. Frenetic and tormented, it depicted a reality that was grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express the contradictions in a country where age-old traditions persist within a modern society. Often blurred, taken from vertiginous angles, or overwhelmed by close-ups, they show a proximity to and a particular relationship with the subject.