The Musée Photo Elysée in Lausanne is dedicating a retrospective until February 23, 2025 to Daidō Moriyama, one of the greatest Japanese photographers and inventor of a new grammar of the image. His work bears witness to the evolution of morals since the post-war period.
A pioneer of street photography known for his highly contrasted black and white shots, Daido Moriyama has been wandering the streets of Tokyo for more than sixty years to immortalize through images these places where all strata of the population mix.
The artist, who was born in Osaka in 1938, followed the evolution of Japanese society, showing in particular the clash between Japanese tradition and the accelerated westernization of the country during the American military occupation which followed the Second World War. worldwide.
During these decades of imposed change, Moriyama saw photography as a democratic language promoted by mass media. He works for magazines and major publications and is inspired by American artists such as William Klein and Andy Warhol.
A fan of Jack Kerouac, he also goes on the road, always with his camera slung over his shoulder, and visits New York, Paris and even London. Always with this desire to document contemporary consumer society.
>> See the 7:30 p.m. topic dedicated to the exhibition presented at Photo Elysée:
A look at the city and the media
“He invented a new vision, a new way of experiencing the world. His images are very dark, very grainy, very blurry, with reflections. They have a sometimes tilted horizon line, which expresses this ambiguous feeling of to be in a society invaded by the American occupation after the war, consumerism, capitalism, pop music, pop culture”, underlines in the 7:30 p.m. of November 16 Thyago Nogueira, curator of the exhibition and responsible from the contemporary photography department of the Instituto Moreira Salles in Sao Paulo (Brazil) which produced this retrospective presented in Switzerland after Berlin and London.
Decisively modifying the perception of photography, Daidō Moriyama created a new grammar of the image. He desecrated it and inspired new generations.
In addition to the dense and contrasting black and white images of the Japanese artist, the retrospective presented at Photo Elysée includes a selection of rarely exhibited color photographs, drawn from the archives that Daidō Moriyama keeps in Tokyo. Some were for personal essays, others were published in magazines like Camera Mainichi, Asahi Camera and Asahi Journal in the 1970s and 1980s.
TV topic: Chloé Steulet
Adaptation web: ld
“Daidō Moriyama – Retrospective”, Photo Elysée, Lausanne, from September 6, 2024 to February 23, 2025.
