Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Sometimes it seems that fb really does have a sense of humor (it's all in the timing...)
Thursday, April 23, 2026
"Kyotographie's Daido Moriyama retrospective resonates in an age of endless images"
Caption: A sprawling retrospective on Moriyama, a giant of Japanese street photography, is on view at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, as part of annual international photo festival Kyotographie.
Daido Moriyama is one of my favorite photographers. You can check out his work in Kyoto now.
Selected text (Thu-Huong Ha) and photos (JOHAN BROOKS) from The Japan Times, April 23, 2026.
Daido Moriyama isn’t precious with his photos; he shoots endlessly, automatically. As a new exhibition suggests, we shouldn’t be precious either.
A large-scale retrospective of the giant of Japanese street photography opened April 18 at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, as part of annual international photo festival Kyotographie. After premiering in 2023 at Instituto Moreira Salles in Sao Paulo and making its way across Europe, the exhibit is showing in Japan for the first time.
“Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective” is massive in scale as well as in scope, covering decades of Moriyama’s work from the 1960s to the present. A discerning viewer will need hours of energy and focused attention to take everything in, not only on the walls, which feature nearly 200 images and 250 printed pages, but on tables that stretch along the galleries. There are another 150 magazines collected, with around 40 books for people to browse, from Moriyama’s acclaimed 2002 photobook “Shinjuku” to his recent “Pretty Woman,” and even a guidebook to Tokyo. The effect is a dizzying, at times overwhelming tunnel of blurred faces and body parts in black and white.
Moriyama, 87, born in 1938 in Osaka Prefecture, is often praised for the way he captured postwar Japan reeling from defeat and pushing quickly toward Westernization. But this characterization only captures a relatively small and early portion of Moriyama’s work, which began in 1965 with his first important series, “Pantomime,” set in an obstetrics and gynecology hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture. Though he initially followed rules of classical photography with sharp and focused composition lines, by the late 1960s Moriyama had already begun to break away, capturing subcultures, experimental theater performers and working class life in Japan.
“He shifted to build a less pretentious look at society,” says exhibition curator Thyago Nogueira, head of the contemporary art department at Instituto Moreira Salles Brazil, during a media preview. “He started to document that expression of culture in society, and to build a different eye that was formulating a certain kind of photography that was more introspective and more subjective, a little tilted, dark.”
Moriyama was focused on examining how photos were used by mass media to mediate reality. He photographed images of major events, like the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as shown on TV and in newspapers, as a commentary on visual culture at the time.
“It was important to me to show how Moriyama was part of a generation of people working in an industry of image-making,” Nogueira tells The Japan Times. “They were not only changing the industry, but also changing the vocabulary and the language of photography in a very clever and self-conscious way.”
Moriyama was anti-elite and favored printed materials that could be cheaply produced and circulated easily. (Although decades later production and distribution would become essentially free, and paper would start to seem like a luxury.)
“He was always saying, ‘I'm not interested in dogmatism, I'm not interested in the fetishization of photography. I'm interested in shared conversations,’” Nogueira says. “The deep, philosophical questions he’s asking about photography were being asked in fanzines, in a very cheap Xerox.”
Moriyama, who is still actively working, is ultimately interested in what a photo is for; but throughout his career he has maintained a skeptical stance not just toward the value of photos as art, but the promise of photojournalism.
“That naivety to think you could try and create masterpieces, that naive humanism to try and help people through your art — that is just too optimistic for me,” Moriyama said in 1971. “I am already struggling just to keep grasp of my own existence.”
Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/04/23/art/daido-moriyama-retrospective-kyotographie/
There's a whole lot going on at the annual international photo festival Kyotographie. Check out thier website.
https://www.kyotographie.jp/en/programs/2026/
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Friday, April 17, 2026
Thursday, April 16, 2026
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
Visual Anthropology in Japan:「The Tachinomi Project」 日本に映像人類学: 「立ち呑みプロジェクト」 @ Salon KGU
Visual Anthropology in Japan:
「The Tachinomi Project」
Abstract:
「The Tachinomi Project」is a visual ethnography based upon the intersections of social science research and contemporary art. The project began with long-term participant-observation and a photographic exhibition featuring a 40-year-old tachinomiya (standing drink bar) in Osaka called Tenbun. The study sought to explore photography in public spaces, privacy and image ethics while showcasing a “grimy” (Farrer 2019) and stimulating atmosphere with colorful characters including the shop owner, employees and regular customers. The interactions with Tenbun collaborators and gallery audience at the exhibition became the first of several post-fieldwork encounters, leading to the re-positioning of the research into wider social and academic contexts during and after the COVID 19 pandemic. This present account utilizes reflexivity, autoethnographic vignettes (Stevens 2013) and photography to explore the intersections of the sensory (Pink 2013 [2009]), multimodal (Collins et al. 2017), and ba (Kajimaru et al. 2021) of Tenbun and other eating and drinking establishments.
Thursday, April 16, 2026
18:30 ~ 20:00
CIE 3rd Floor Seminar Room
日本に映像人類学:
「立ち呑みプロジェクト」
職場の同僚と自分の研究成果を共有する機会…
要旨:
「立ち呑みプロジェクト」は、社会科学的調査と現代美術の交差領域に立脚したビジュアル・エスノグラフィーである。本プロジェクトは、大阪の創業40年の立ち呑み屋「天文」における長期的参与観察、ならびに同店を主題とした写真展を起点に始まった。本研究は、公共空間における写真撮影、プライバシー、および映像倫理を検討することを目的とし、店主や従業員、常連客といった多様な人々が織りなす、「猥雑（grimy）」（Farrer 2019）かつ刺激的な空間の様相を詳らかにするものである。 フィールドワーク後、写真展における「天文」協力者と観覧者とのインターアクションを皮切りに、コロナ禍中またそれ以降のより広範な社会的・学術的文脈で捉え直すこととなった。 本研究では、再帰性、オートエスノグラフィー的ヴィニエット（Stevens 2013）、写真を通し、「天文」をはじめとする飲食施設における感覚（Pink 2013 [2009]）、マルチモーダル（Collins et al. 2017）、場（Kajimaru et al. 2021）の交差について論じる。
2026年4月16日（木）
18:30～20:00
CIE 3階 セミナー室
春から初夏にかけてのサロンKGUの全スケジュールはこちらです。
Here is the complete Salon KGU schedule for the spring and early summer:
BONUS!
Katano Sakura Junmai Ginjo Sake Yukinoka (Scent of Snow) 17%
片野桜大吟醸袋吊りしずく(令和7酒造年度) 17度
Katano Sakura Daiginjo Undiluted Brew Genshu (2025) 17%
山野酒造 大阪府交野市
Yamano Sake Brewery Katano City, Osaka Prefecture
URL: https://www.katanosakura.com/
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