15 May 2008

Moriyama Exhibit at Tokyo Photography Museum


I went to see a photo exhibit of Daido Moriyama at the Tokyo Shashin Bijutsukan recently. He is a famous post-war photographer from Osaka who innovated a style of high contrast, blurry, grainy photos, often with skewed horizons. He refers to himself as a "stray dog" (title of the image above) since a large part of his time as a freelance photographer was spent roaming the city streets and sometimes isolated areas. His work reminded me that you can see some amazing things in ordinary everyday life (if you are looking closely enough). They showed a video after and its incredible how this guy takes photos (sometimes not even looking through the lens, just quick, bold, and no hesitation). What was also cool was he seemed to 'paint' his photos as much as he take them with his exposure techniques. Check ut some shots on his official site by clicking his name at the top of the post.

Inspired by the show, I took some "shirokuro" (black and white) shots myself below ... with a little help from the digital darkroom, of course : )