“The culture shock of defeat is my archetypal image,” the photographer Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012) once said. “No matter where I go, I carry the shadow of war.” And Daido Moriyama (born in 1938), whom Tomatsu mentored, declared: “I wanted to go to the end of photography.” The two artists, relatively close in age, began their careers at a time of radical change in postwar Japan, and they enjoyed a deep, lifelong friendship based in their work.
Japan, devastated by its defeat in World War II and deeply wounded by the traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then sought a new identity while both resisting and accommodating the growing influence of American culture. Tomatsu and Moriyama both lived, on and off, in Tokyo, sharing a fascination with the street life of Shinjuku and Shibuya, two of the city’s nonconformist, marginal neighborhoods. Both were born into what has been called “the generation of distrust,” and they were instrumental in Japanese photography’s breaking with the formalism that defined its earlier practice; they pioneered instead a new kind of “subjective photography practice” rich in emotions, as the curator Simon Baker writes in his text for the exhibition catalog.
Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Daido Moriyama: Shibuya, from the series “Lettre à Saint Loup,” 1990
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