Meara Sharma at Artforum:
To encounter the work of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is to see the world not through his eyes but through his whole being. His angles are dizzyingly extreme, as if shot from the perspective of his knees, his toes, the back of his head. His subjects are blurred and warped, conjuring a sense of frenetic movement through space. His images—mostly black-and-white—are intensely high contrast, evocative of the sun’s unforgiving glare or the heightened realm of dreams. Rather than proposing an artfully constructed vision of the world, his photographs (whether of television screens or thronging beaches or fishnet-sheathed legs or discarded dolls) attempt to embody the fragmented experience of existence: its chaos, its precariousness, its fundamental inscrutability.
Moriyama’s signature style—known as are, bure, boke, which translates as “grainy, blurry, out of focus”—stems from a lifelong suspicion of photography’s capacity to capture reality, evident in the eighty-five-year-old artist’s potent retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery.
more here.