Daido Moriyama

Based on the retrospective exhibition organized by the Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art in Seville in March of 2007, this stunning book offers a new look at the work of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. An implacable visionary of our fragmented postmodern world, Moriyama is famous not only for his stark images of urban life but also for his transformation of everyday ordinariness, the stream of perceptions that our restless sense of sight registers at every moment of our waking hours. The volume constitutes a wide-ranging overview of Moriyama's highly contrasted, oddly-angled black-and-white photographs from every period of his career. The striking cover of the catalogue is the creation of noted Japanese designer Tadanori Yokoo. The book includes a brief introductory text by José Lebrero Stals and a penetrating essay by Minoru Shimizu, which places Moriyama's work in the context of postmodern critical theory on photography, from Benjamin to Barthes to Derrida. Finally, a couple of moving texts by Moriyama himself -"Between Yesterday and Tomorrow" and "Dialogue with Photography"- describe the discovery of his vocation and how he abolished the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity in his art to explore the relentlessly momentary nature of photographs, "fossils of light and time."