Record no.52 - Daido Moriyama

"On the occasion of the publication of volume 50 of the Record journal, my works were shown in a long-term slide show event at the AKIO NAGASAWA Gallery in Ginza, from late May until early October. I visited the venue several times since the start of this program, placed myself in the middle of the 5,000 miscellaneous images that were projected onto every inch of the gallery’s walls by seven projectors, and enjoyed the strange experience of standing there, isolated from daily life, and being hit from all sides by the showers of light. The images that were covering the surrounding walls entirely, were quite certainly slides of my own photographs, but due to the complex, constantly changing entanglement of space and time, the pictures that I looked at nimbly slipped out of my field of vision, and left me feel transformed into a sleepwalker who wanders through far and unknown landscapes.

The strange and chaotic images from Tokyo, Marrakech and New York that were perpetually projected onto the walls, had disconnected from the one who shot them, to pursue the anonymous notion that is supposedly inherent in a photograph. It had become totally irrelevant that I was the one who made them, and before I knew it, the projected images transformed into the very “spirit” that is photography itself.
Witnessing this slide show of my own works was an experience that, even at this point in time, taught me a whole new way of responding to them.

Upon opening the gallery’s door and stepping inside, the visitor was instantly greeted by a curious kind of soundscape.That unfathomable mix of sounds was composed of all sorts of tones that were recorded at various places in the streets, and layered on top of each other. Including the occasional flirtatious moan of a woman, it was a mysterious noise that gradually percolated into the listener’s mind."

– from the afterword by Daido Moriyama

stock number: NB511