Are, bure, boke.
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Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective
The Photographer’s Gallery
Ramillies Street
London W1F 7LW
16th January 2024
For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality.
Daido Moriyama
We’re surrounded by the captured image, but few show reality or reveal anything deeper than their already two-dimensional forms. In our age of social media, this is often by deliberate design in order to present a carefully-curated output for mass consumption or perhaps, less calculatingly, through a religious-like devotion to following the ‘rules of photography’. Other times, it’s simply through the inability of the technology we use to take a ‘bad’ photo. But this multitude of in-focus, correctly-exposed pictures of recognisable objects and subjects rarely hold our attention for long. We see them, we ‘get it’ and quickly scroll on, perhaps pausing only to click a ‘like’; a simple motor action, but one which holds the potential to negate the possibility of any future experimentation and innovation.
The Daido Moriyama retrospective at the Photographer’s Gallery is not that and shows clearly how he rejected the ‘dogmatism of art and the fetishisation of the image’. As such, it is hard to imagine many of the 200+ images on display getting more than a few likes on Instagram but, as he (obviously) does not post any of his art on his Insta page, that is only conjecture. And yet his pictures, displayed across four floors of the Gallery, come the closest to showing life as I feel I know it in all its messy, glorious reality. My overriding emotion at the exhibition was a feeling of being overwhelmed, as if I was looking through his camera, frame-by-frame, in real time, as he captured the world around him in the cities of post-war Japan and beyond. It felt thrilling to just hold on.
"Get outside. It’s all about getting out and walking. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, forget everything you’ve learned on the subject of photography for the moment, and just shoot. Take photographs—of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don’t pause to think."
Daido Moriyama
It’s very hard to let go of everything you know about how to take a photograph. But if you take the time to turn off all the auto modes on your camera and simply walk freely through your day, taking images only as you ‘feel’ them, and use your camera not as a tool but as an extension of your perception, with little concern for image quality, precise focus, composition or exposure to produce pictures that might be ‘are, bure, boke,’ - as the early Japanese critics of Moriyama’s images termed them - then the liberating sensation that provides is immense and joyful and the images captured perhaps more meaningful and personal.
“Photographers can only take pictures,” asserts Moriyama. But what pictures he takes! His images continue to challenge the notion that photography is limited by time or place leaving, at the heart of his radical and subversive re-invention of street photography, the crucial question: “What is photography?”
Prem Kumar
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Prem Kumar
All images and opinions my own and held firmly somewhere in the Cloud
In this collection of photoessays, I aim to capture certain aspects of modern culture as seen through a lens shaped either by Apple, Fujifilm and/or my own perspective.
