Labyrinth: Daido Moriyama

Throughout his career, Daido Moriyama has sought new ways of recasting his images through the use of different printing techniques, installation, or by re-editing and re-formatting them. For this volume, Moriyama has returned to his contact sheets from the past five decades, selecting both classic and previously unpublished images. Included here are reproductions of original contact sheets; sequences of new contact sheets made from recombined negative strips that juxtapose images from the 1950s with those from the past ten years; and selections of individual images, both familiar and newly discovered. Together, they offer a comprehensive assembly of Moriyama’s oeuvre, tracing recurring motifs and proposing startling new interpretations of some of his most iconic photographs. In opening up this private process of reexamination to a wider public, Moriyama continues to challenge the viewer, his own practice and the larger mechanisms by which photography makes meaning.
Daido Moriyama (born 1938) has been publishing and exhibiting his photography since the late 1960s, with a bibliography of more than 300 monographs to his name. A major retrospective, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, originated in 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and subsequently toured internationally to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Japan Society in New York, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and numerous other venues. He is a recipient of the Cultural Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie and the 2012 Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. Exhibitions include a major retrospective, On the Road, presented at the Osaka National Museum of Art from June to October 2011, and William Klein/Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern from October 2012 to January 2013.