PARIS.- For Daido Moriyama, photography is alive, very much alive. Since the early 1960s, he has maintained a daily, almost existential relationship with it. He addresses photography through images, books and writing, each time a declaration. In 1972, his book Shashin yo sayonara [Farewell Photography] broke from the rules of “good” photography.

At the same time, he published essays in Japanese photography magazines (Asahi Camera, Provoke, Shashin Jidai, etc.), each a kind of manifesto. He would also make repeated pilgrimages to sites associated with the very first photographer, Nicéphore Niépce. Many of his everyday images turn the medium back on itself—they hold up a mirror to it.

The exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is not a traditional retrospective organized around a chronological sequence of masterpieces. It is structured around a single, decisive premise: Moriyama’s obsession with photography itself.

THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition Love Letters to Photography consists of 60 prints accompanied by documents and publications, mainly drawn from the archives of the Moriyama Foundation, and is organized into 4 sections.

Manifestos

"It might seem like a somewhat ironic title [Farewell Photography], but it’s about my feelings of hate and wanting to say farewell to spiritually peaceful photographs, to photographs that show no doubt about what photography means, in other words photographs that lack all reality." -- Daido Moriyama, 1972

At the end of 1972, Daido Moriyama published a radically experimental book titled Shashin yo sayonara [Farewell Photography]. The book is both a provocation and a declaration of war against the photographic establishment. With deliberately blurred, dark, off-center images—grainy and often difficult to read—he challenged everything that defined “good” photography at the time. For him, this marked a break from tradition. But after this rupture, photography had to be relearned. Moriyama then set out to rediscover photography by exploring its basic properties: framing, reproducibility, documentary value, etc. The printed image, whether in books or magazines, was central to his work. Each publication stands as a manifesto.

Pilgrimages

In the mid-1970s, the artist discovered what is considered the earliest surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, made by Nicéphore Niépce between 1826 and 1827 from a window of his house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. Moriyama became fascinated by this foundational image, which contains the essential questions he continues to ask about the medium. In 1990, he published Lettre à St. Lou. [sic], a work that reads as a love letter to photography. In 2008, he traveled to the site to photograph the window from which Niépce worked. In 2015, he went to Austin, Texas, where the original plate is now preserved. He also keeps a poster of the image at home, which he has photographed repeatedly over the years. Brought together here for the first time, these different series form a set of tributes to photography’s earliest moments.

“I felt the desire to offer a kind of tribute to Niépce, who had always remained somewhere in my heart, and to that photograph taken long ago. This is why I chose this title. It was a love letter to Niépce and to his photograph.” -- Daido Moriyama, 2017

Metaphors

Alongside his exploration of the medium—through self-reflexive series and tributes to Niépce—Moriyama developed a highly recognizable style: a direct, rapid approach to photography, often shot in the street. Many of these images function as metaphors for photography itself: a camera, rolls of film, a portrait studio display window, a red light, a few sunflowers—a photographer’s favorite flower, because it always turns toward the sun. He also practiced self-portraiture extensively. When he photographs his shadow or his reflection in a mirror, it is not out of narcissism. Through the figure of the photographer, he is ultimately addressing photography itself. From the beginning, Moriyama works within what might be called meta-photography—with evident pleasure.

Writings

Moriyama’s best-known photograph is that of a stray dog, taken in 1971 in the low, raking light of an early morning, almost backlit. Present in nearly all his exhibitions and publications, printed in both orientations and reproduced across multiple formats, it has become one of the iconic images of 20th-century photography. It has appeared on whiskey and olive oil bottles, as well as on pins, plates, and magnets.

For Moriyama, this image is a self-portrait. It appears on the cover of his first collection of writings, published in 1984 under the title Inu no kioku [Memories of a Dog]. Alongside his photographic work, Moriyama has written extensively, publishing more than a dozen volumes. The publication accompanying this exhibition presents, for the first time in French, twenty-two of his texts on photography. Long overdue.