Women and girls are recurrent subjects in Daido Moriyama’s Shashin Jidai exhibition. The exhibition is located at the Dashwood Project, a new gallery space from NYC’s beloved photobook store of the same name.
Daido Moriyama is a household name in Japanese photography. He started active in the 1960s, photographing a dark paradise of Japanese social turbulence after losing World War II. Violence, sex drive, and ugliness are rendered aggressively through high-contrast, high-grain, tilted framing that later characterized the style of the decades, inspired and mutually developed within that time photographer peers. In the mean time, magazines played a pivotal role in Japanese photography culture.
One of them, Shashin Jidai, means Photography Era, an underground socio-erotic magazine focus on photo essay running in the 1980s. The exhibition focuses on Moriyama’s 7 years contributing to the magazine, shooting social documentary photo essays. Combining pages from magazines with prints, recontextualize photo essays into the singular solid story of random elements in changing Japan. Pairing bathroom tiles with similar patterns of erotic fishnet stockings, high school girls in bright sunlight after school with muddy abandon bikes, and an abandoned horse with cherry blossom.
The selection and sequence highlight how magazine assignments helped Moriyama polish his style, and how a graphic-like composition in his works, as his background was in graphic design, can cross over genres and subjects; still life, documentary, soft-porn, nature, food, without fail.
Looking through rendering of 1980s Japanese girls and women in Moriyama’s film-noir lens, we can see women on the other side of the first exhibition even they’re 100 years apart. In the time where social norm was ruined, somehow women living distorted from society’s expectation seems intrigueing for Japanese post-war Avant-Garde documentary. While it’s important to have these photographs of women in those turbulent time, the gaze, which was common at the time, could feel like exploitation and not sit well, especially photographs of high school girls on a street considered printed in socio-erotic magazines catered for male audiences.
