For Moriyama and many other artists of his generation, the “new” Japan created after the war became the core subject of their work. It is the complex nature of the change that has informed Moriyama’s photographs: the starting juxtaposition of age-old tradition with contemporary practice, the paradox of a culture that found the transformation at once disturbing and liberating, shocking and compelling. Moriyama’s pictures are grainy, full of harsh contrasts, deliberately raw, and eschew technical sophistication. Yet in them stylistic elements derived from the popular media – tabloids, advertisements, television – have been transformed into a subtle, sophisticated aesthetic. One that has been shaped by the photography of William Klein and Andy Warhol, the novels of James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac, and the experimental theater of Shūji Terayama. Moriyama has filtered these diverse influences through his own distinctive perspective to create an extraordinary body of work. This book was published as a retrospective of Moriyama’s work at SF Moma in 1999 and condenses in around 160 pages his career until then. Check how it looks inside in Patreon. SF Moma, 1999. 260 x 230 mm. Hardcover, 160 pages, with obi. ISBN: 0918471508 First edition. Condition: Very good.
