As I have said before in earlier posts, Daido Moriyama is probably one of my biggest influences in my photography, although I have not really been using his style in my photography as much I could.
So today I decided to really incorporate his style in my photography and see what the results are.
It was actually quite good. The reason why is because Daidos approach to photography has no rules to it just a simple philosophy which is to be at one with your surroundings and shoot with feeling and not the constraints of compositions and the constant worry of the clutter of the city.
You might think that Street Photography is just walking around clicking away and there are no rules but this is not true, as I am starting to realise.
To achieve the SP aesthetic requires following a lot of rules and also relying on a lot of luck. This is why your hit rate will be around 97-99% so for every 100 pictures you take you may get 2 or 3 that are really good, or should I say you yourself deem to be really good. Post them on a SP critique page and people will have a different view so you may walk away think "oh no all my photos are shit.
Daido did not carry this burden. He did not care. There was no end game to his photography, just a feeling that he had inside of him to capture his surroundings and the constant rate of change that was happening fast but yet slow. Here is a short bio.
Daido Moriyama (b.1938) is one of Japan’s foremost contemporary photographers. His early works reveal the dark underside of urban Japanese life, and the breakdown of strict, traditional values in the post-war period. One of the photographer’s aims is to reveal the hidden beauty in that which is conventionally regarded as flawed, engaging closely with the Japanese world-view of wabi-sabi which seeks beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature. Strongly inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Moriyama is interested in the importance of the journey; he wanders large metropolises and attempts to uncover the seedier sides of urban life, as well as the hidden parts of the city. In part due to these reasons, his work has a strong sense of voyeurism.
Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama initially trained as a graphic designer, before becoming fascinated with the world of photography and studying it as a discipline under Takeji Iwamiya. In 1961, Moriyama moved to Tokyo with the intention of joining the revolutionary photographer’s group: VIVO. Once there Moriyama worked as an assistant for the distinguished photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, and assisted in his dark, erotic series, Ordeal by Roses, 1961-62. In the late sixties, Moriyama aligned with many avant-garde Japanese photographers including Shōmei Tōmatsu and Takuma Nakahira, and joined the radical photography magazine, PROVOKE, whose mission was to question the very nature of photography.
The first lot of pictures will be by Daido and then I will present mine. Capturing the seductiveness of Bristol is not easy and is out of my comfort zone to be honest. Japanese attitude towards sex and nudity is very realxed where is in England it is still seen as a bit taboo. Yes after all this time we still see sex as a form of procreation and not a form of expression.
Dont be put off by the camera shake, blur and out of focus pictures. We are so obsessed with high definition, sharpness and mega pixels. Henri Cartier Bresson once said that sharpness is overrated. Lets face it, if HCB is saying that it must be true.
Here are mine
