Daido Moriyama's knack for finding the extraordinary image in ordinary surroundings
Japanese photographer has two exhibitions – one group, one solo – in Hong Kong currently, showing the depth of his 'are, bure, boke' aesthetic
Daido Moriyama stands on a kerb on Central's Ice House Street, cigarette in one hand, camera in the other. It's grey and wet, and while most people would find such surroundings somewhat dull, the Japanese photographer was seeing something very different. He has a knack for making the ordinary look extraordinary - his solo show, "Catching Eye, Catching Mind" at the Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery until November 7, is proof of that.
"I don't find the ordinary boring. I find the everyday life very interesting, very intriguing - it's very exciting," says Moriyama.
Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, aviator sunglasses swinging from his V-neck, 76-year-old Moriyama looks like one of the beat generation artists that have influenced his work over a career that has spanned more than 40 years (one image in this show is titled Andy Warhol, while one of Moriyama’s photobooks, On the Road, was named after Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name). "Even today I'm influenced by those artists, especially Warhol."
Enter the gallery and the first image you'll see you is Stray Dog: Unofficial Self-portrait, one of Moriyama's most iconic. Taken in 1971, it continues to both intrigue and unnerve. But that's what Moriyama does best. One of the leading figures in post-war photography, Moriyama pushed the country's creative boundaries when he joined Provoke, an experimental photography magazine founded by Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki and Takuma Nakahira. The magazine sought to refresh the aesthetics of photography, and to question the increasingly commercial visual language of Japanese society in the 1960s.
Moriyama's blurry and raw street photos challenged the Japanese photography world and they loved it, as did the rest of the world (he has shown solo and group exhibitions worldwide).