Daido Moriyama - Light & Shadow - 1982

Light & Shadow

Daido Moriyama
Tōjusha/1982/Japanese/220*295*15
Approximately 13 pages from the back cover have holes and show signs of damage.

Light & Shadow (First Edition)” is a collection of works by Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. It is a masterpiece along with “Nippon Gekijo Shashincho” and “Shashin yo sayonara” and is one of Moriyama's major works in his early and mid career. Since “Shashin yo sayonara (Good-bye to Photography),” in which Moriyama rejects conventional concepts of photography, denies realism, and declares farewell to the conventional act of photography itself, he has been stuck in his ideas of what photography is and what the act of taking a picture is, and has lost the balance between thought and action. At that time, he was reminded of the “landscape photographs” of Niepce, a pioneer in photographic technology, which captured the light. He decided to go back to his roots, and instead of sticking to a style that tried to express his own thoughts, he decided to simply capture the facts, their light and shadow products right in front of his eyes. Just as Takuma Nakahira shifted from an alebriquet style to a straightforward, live-action style, so too did Moriyama return to simply “copying” the reality created by nature, while basing his work on a black-and-white, graphical style rich in design.