Getty Museum
Shinjuku
Creator
Daido MoriyamaJapanese Editor · 1938–present
All works by this person →Over the course of a long career, Hiromichi (Daidō) Moriyama has become one of the most known and prolific Japanese photographers working today. His projects are diverse, yet he often focuses on images of cities and explorations of light and shadow, form and abstraction. Self-taught, Moriyama began his career in the early 1960s as an apprentice to Eikoh Hosoe, assisting on the production of the ex
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 2002
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- Japanese
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
>With its indecency, hardness and disconsolateness, the city functions in strange ways and yet exposes itself as lively; it is almost a contemporary Babylon. I think that Shinjuku and I have a similar nature; perhaps that is the reason why I cannot help but be fascinated by it. > >--Daidō Moriyama Since the 1960s Daidō Moriyama has actively recorded the subculture of Tokyo. During his career he has gravitated to the dense ward of Shinjuku--known for its colossal train station, bright neon signage, and Golden Gai (a narrow network of alleyways crowded with small bars and clubs). In such neighborhoods he has located the gritty, unseemly side of the city associated with yakuza mobsters, love hotels, strip clubs, dive bars, and people who exist on the margins. The grainy, high-contrast, black and white aesthetic in Moriyama's photographs enhances the inherently surreal, highly disorienting qualities of the underground scene he documents.
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