Daido Moriyama’s sweeping retrospective brings Tokyo streets to Helsinki

For 60 years, 85-year-old photographer Daido Moriyama has been influencing photographers around the world with his prolific output of gritty, urban imagery and commitment to sharing his work via self-publishing.

“Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective,” currently exhibiting in Helsinki at The Finnish Museum of Photography’s K1 gallery in the Kamp Galleria shopping center, attempts to encapsulate all six decades with 200 works, two video installations and some of the photographer’s rare photobooks and magazines. In doing so, it succeeds in creating a cohesive but somewhat crowded overview of Moriyama’s career for his first-ever retrospective in Finland.

“What we wanted to do in this small space is have as many images available as we could,” explains K1’s curator, Paivio Maurice Omwami, adding that he and his team worked with Brazilian curator Thyago Nogueira of Instituto Moreira Salles to adapt the sprawling retrospective for the gallery’s limited subterranean space in downtown Helsinki after the show’s four-month run at The Photographer’s Gallery in London. “The pace is quite intense at moments, but it allows the audience to say, ‘OK, I’ll pop back in another time to sit with all this work again.’”

The exhibition includes a selection from Provoke, a dōjinshi (self-published magazine) founded in 1968, which Moriyama worked on with his compatriots Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada, Yutaka Takanashi and Koji Taki. The publication presented photography not as an objective art form but as an interpretive, self-expressive and unperfected medium. Despite only three original issues (with print runs of 1,000 copies each), Provoke stands as one of the early and most influential examples of the “zine” culture, which has seen a resurgence in the photo world in recent years.

The magazine would go on to define the style of Japanese postwar street photography in the 1970s and ’80s, now referred to as the Provoke Era. “Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective” gives viewers the opportunity to examine these rare publications firsthand.

Moriyama’s first-ever retrospective in Finland has local photographers asking themselves if the uncalculated approach used in his raw street photography could spark an alternative style in Helsinki. | Lance Henderstein

Moriyama’s ongoing commitment to self-publishing is presented in an impressive video installation of his current photography magazine, Kiroku (Record), which launched in 1972. Only five issues appeared between 1972 and 1973, but since 2006, the magazine has been published two or three times a year, with some editions showcasing Moriyama’s colorwork.

The immersive experience occupies an entire room, allowing audiences to virtually walk the streets of Moriyama’s Japan. On two walls, images appear and fade to create an ever-changing projected collage of the hundreds of photographs published in the over 50 editions of Kiroku.

“Moriyama has spent his career asking a fundamental question: What is the essence of photography?” writes Nogueira in the exhibition notes on the show’s focus on Moriyama’s highly iterative practice. “He rejected the dogmatism of art and the fetishization of vintage prints, instead embracing the accessible and reproducible aspects of photography as its most radical asset.”

Moriyama’s influence among European photographers is evident. His distinctive style has informed the striking black-and-white work of Nordic photographers such as Sweden’s Anders Petersen and Jacob Aue Sobol of Denmark, as well as contemporary Japan-focused, French photographers like Chloe Jafe and Maki, and countless others.

Outside of the gallery, Moriyama’s first-ever retrospective in Finland has local photographers asking themselves if the uncalculated approach used in his raw street photography could spark an alternative style in Helsinki, where a more refined, fine art photography tradition of photographers and printmakers like Pentti Sammallahti is the established model for success.

Italy-born, Helsinki-based photographer Filippo Zambon says Moriyama’s instinctual, unpretentious photographic lifestyle is something the Finnish photo scene would do well to embrace.

“Japanese photographers like Moriyama seem to have transcended the need to ‘construct’ an image — the image is already there,” he says. “The photographer has to transcend themselves so they can see it.”

Provoke, a self-published magazine that Moriyama worked on with his compatriots, went on to define the style of Japanese postwar street photography in the 1970s and ’80s, now referred to as the Provoke Era. | Lance Henderstein

Zambon also says the highly academic nature of the art scene in Finland and other Nordic countries, funded by generous but highly competitive grants, can cause photography to be thought of merely as a tool in the service of artists.

“The photography scene here is the total opposite (to Moryiyama’s intuitive practice),” says Zambon. “Photography in Helsinki can be a bit like, ‘I’m an artist first. I have a project. I do research. Maybe I write a book or thesis about it. Then I make a pitch and apply for a grant.’

“The photographic medium is not (seen as) a tool for research and interrogation. Photography (as Moriyama practices it) is more an extension of one’s understanding of reality. A photographer can only make work like this by abandoning all these academic constructs.”

Filmmaker and photojournalist Heidi Piiroinen, who photographed love hotels in Japan for her project “The End of Love,” says Moriyama’s willingness to explore the darker sides of human nature through photography resonates most with her.

“I always work on a personal level. Trying to find a connection. A lot of my photography is about sharing our shadows, our loneliness, and creating art from pain,” Piiroinen says. “The camera can give the photographer an excuse to be there, and Moriyama seems to have a level of integrity — there's an honesty to his work I respect.”

It’s that perceived artistic integrity and singular vision for photography and self-publishing that drives such adoration of Moriyama from his peers.

“Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective” acts as a memory palace, each image revealing another hidden corner of the photographer’s mind. A wealth of images, separated by time and place, come together to create a record of Moriyama’s photographic life — an ambitiously curated overview of the life and work of one of Japan’s greatest living photographers.