T H E R E F L E X I V E P H OTO G R A P H E R

CHAPTER SIX

THE COLLAPSE
OF MEMORY:
TRACING
REFLEXIVITY
IN THE WORK
OF DAIDO
MORIYAMA

J M Hammond
The Courtauld Institute of Art

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Photography itself may be summed up in the words

“memory/commemoration/document” not by
“expression/aesthetics”, which are, I believe, added
to the meaning of a photograph only at a later point.
(Moriyama, 2006: 97)

Inspired initially by figures such as William Klein,

Robert Frank and Andy Warhol, Osaka-born Daido
Moriyama has long kept us supplied with a stream
of work that documents, questions and problematises
our relationship with the world. This chapter consid-
ers reflexivity in Moriyama’s work with particular ref-
erence to his photography from the early 1970s and to
the ideas that Moriyama wrote about at that time. One
year after Moriyama attempted to brutally interro-
gate his chosen medium, through the fragmented and
often illegible images in his book Farewell Photography
(1972), he was back on the streets and back in the dark-
room, making images for the series Chijo, which ran
from January to December 1973 in Asahi Camera and
his own self-produced magazine Kiroku (which trans-
lates as document) launched that same year.
The same year he also published the text “From
Document to Memory” in a special June 1973 edition of
Asahi Camera, a popular monthly photography maga-
zine that often carried the blurred, coarse-grained

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and high-contrast images that made the Japanese

photographer’s name. In the text, Moriyama not only
reflects upon the nature of his work but enquires into
the very nature of photography itself. In fact he goes
further. At the opening of the text his contemplations
on photography involve him going over many of the
questions he has asked himself about his practice – in
effect, a reflection on his own reflections. From these
thoughts, Moriyama identifies his core concerns to
be less about the possible function of photography,
or what it can achieve, than about the almost philo-
sophical issue of what photography essentially is:

When I think about photography in its various

aspects… I am always confronted ultimately with
these simple questions: ‘Why do people (I) take
photographs?’ and ‘What is a camera?’ – even before
questions such as ‘How do I take photographs?’ or
‘What can I accomplish through photography?’
(2006: 96)

For Moriyama the camera is essentially a tool for

recording and documenting, rather than a means
toward making art – a technology that essentially
helps fulfil mankind’s deeply felt urge to preserve
something of the world, but not the desire to comment

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upon it. Moriyama writes, “I think photography is

a method of commemoration. This is a rather sim-
plistic answer, though. Of course, one could use the
word ‘document.’ Or the word ‘memory’ may describe
it more closely.” (2006: 96) Moriyama retains a certain
ambivalence toward the terms kioku (memory) and
kiroku (document), deliberately playing on the close
correspondence between the two words in Japanese,1
a correspondence similar perhaps to the linguistic
similarity and overlap in meaning between memory
and memorial in English. By insisting that photogra-
phy is essentially concerned with commemoration
more than expression or aesthetics, Moriyama takes
position on a core debate almost as old as the practice
of photography itself (Moriyama, 2006). Curiously, he
appears equally as sceptical as the ranks of nineteenth
century commentators who initially dismissed the
medium as simply a mechanical record of the world,
not an artistic engagement with it or a reflection
upon it.
For Moriyama too it is the impersonal, mechanical
nature of the photographic apparatus that makes it
ill-suited as a means of artistic expression.2 He argues
that, “photography, in its very formation and exist-
ence, blocks the photographer’s imagination and
feelings.” (2006: 96) Self-conscious art photography

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be damned: despite the fact that the coffee-table book

and the art exhibition are some of the main platforms
for his own images, Moriyama writes that fine-art
photography is “…the last place I can think of to find
the purpose of my photographs.” (2006: 95) It is per-
haps logical, then, that Moriyama considers himself
to be working in the field of journalism, where the
expression of the photographer’s personal feelings is
considered anathema to the job at hand of capturing
the cold, hard facts.
Yet, despite his distrust of the impersonal mecha-
nism of photography, not only is his choice of subject
often too marginal and his approach too personal for
typical news photography, his work is often funda-
mentally at odds with many core tenets of photo-
journalism – tenets that require clarity of image,
simplicity of composition and message, and at least
an attempt toward objectivity.3 Rather than appear-
ing in newspapers and other traditional journalistic
media as a visual illustration of, or accompaniment
to, topical stories, Moriyama’s images more usually
appear in photographic magazines as the subject of
interest in themselves. They are also often presented
with minimal or no explanatory text – in either
case without sufficient context or topical weight to
perform traditional journalistic functions. Although

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FIG 1: Daido Moriyama, KARIUDO (Hunter), 1972. Black & white print.
© Daido Moriyama. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

he has lived through some of the most tumultuous

periods of recent Japanese history, Moriyama’s cover-
age of important political or social events is minimal
and idiosyncratic. For example, Figure 1 (a photo-
graph of a 1969 street demonstration in Shinjuku)
captures some of the tension of the situation but
ignores its sheer scale – it is not quite clear that the
skirmish is indeed part of a larger demonstration and
not just an isolated incident.4
About this tendency, Moriyama writes: “Even if I
encounter an event by chance and release the shut-
ter while facing it, my photography does not assume

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any journalistic value – and that event is immediately

integrated into my ‘inner photography’.” (2006: 95)
Throughout From Document to Memory Moriyama
returns to this “personal” nature of his work, even pit-
ting this against the “societal” aspect of most journal-
istic images, contradicting his avowed affiliation with
the profession. He writes that this “personal” work
leaves a sense of “emptiness” that he is nonetheless
compelled to capture “because it is in these congeries
of emptiness that the spaces between historical events
are filled.” (2006: 97) In this regard, Moriyama could
be considered as engaging in journalism only if the
practice is understood as being undertaken on his
own terms. This ambiguous stance toward journal-
ism notwithstanding, in his fascination with the city
Moriyama aligns himself in particular with the figure
of the roving photographer-reporter, photo-journal-
ist or street photographer, documenting everyday
city life during the heyday of modernism in the early
twentieth century. A number of varying, often contra-
dictory, conceptions of this figure have been handed
down to us, including that of the writer Christopher
Isherwood in his reflections on his attempts to record
life in Berlin: “I am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording
the man shaving at the window opposite and the

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woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day,

all this will have to be developed, carefully printed,
fixed.” (Isherwood cited in Campany, 2008: 25). A
similar approach may be evident with Moriyama,
but, even so, his photography is highly discriminate
and selective, a world away from Isherwood’s open
shutter, passively and indiscriminately recording
everything before him. Although you could hardly
say Moriyama’s photographs are carefully chosen
and executed from a compositional or technical
standpoint, neither are they simply random, captur-
ing, as they seemingly do, an instant that connects
in some meaningful way with the photographer –
whether that be his experience or his imagination or
expression.
A “heightened expression” (Campany, 2008:34) of
the photographer-reporter can be found in the 1929
collage by Umbo for the cover of Egon Irwin Kisch’s
The Frantic Reporter, a conception of the figure that
allows us to see some clear similarities and differ-
ences with Moriyama:

A man-machine observing, recording and

interpreting all at once… Straddling the city, he
has a car and an aeroplane for feet, pens for arms, a
typewriter for a chest and, of course, a camera-eye.

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The time lag necessary for critical reflection on the

world has gone. (Campany, 2008: 34).

Emblematic of the modern age’s faith in technology

to capture the truth, The Frantic Reporter also speaks
to the perverse desire/fear to become one with the
technology and together master the world. And there
is no time to waste, no pause in which to stop and
think. Equally frantic is Moriyama, working with
small, light cameras loaded with film of seventy-two
shots per roll, to be “used up like machine gun ammu-
nition” (Moriyama, 2007: 210). Moriyama’s more
intimate connection with the city streets displaces
the all-seeing, all-knowing, monolithic camera-eye
as the central motif of these earlier conceptions of
the photographer, who no longer stands dominant
over the city. In contrast, Moriyama stalks the city’s
streets and back alleys, shooting with a swift flick of
the arm, without stopping to look through the view-
finder to arrange focus, composition or lighting. We
could say where the photographer-reporter (typified
by The Frantic Reporter) had been subsumed into the
machine, the camera has now been subsumed into
Moriyama’s very being.
Indeed, where the acknowledged father of street
photography, Henri Cartier Bresson talks of the

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camera as being an “extension of his eye” (Campany,

2008: 25), Moriyama offers the metaphor of taking
photographs with his “entire body” (2007: 210) –
an altogether more physical experience. Bresson
describes prowling the streets, craving “to seize the
whole essence, in the confines of one single photo-
graph, of some situation that was in the process of
unrolling itself before my eyes.” (Bresson cited in
Campany, 2008: 25) Something of Isherwood’s pas-
sivity remains – “an observer not quite in the world
but removed, as if watching it on a screen” (Campany,
2008: 25) – but it is now complemented by the need for
Bresson’s intervention into the world in order to cap-
ture the celebrated “decisive moment”, whether it be
of social and historical significance or of an episodic,
everyday nature, like his famous 1952 image of a man
jumping over a puddle. But if Bresson holds back,
“ready to pounce” (Bresson cited in Campany, 2008: 25)
at the opportune moment, Moriyama conceives
himself as totally immersed and fully engaged in the
world that he photographs, not just as observer but as
active participant. If the aim of the photographer for
Bresson is to grasp the “essence” of objective reality,
for Moriyama it is to leave a record, or memory, of
a subjective experience of the world – created, per-
haps, at the point where the two coincide or collide.

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This approach would point to Moriyama as a reflexive

photographer less in the sense of one who displays
conscious self-reflexivity in his practice, than as one
who works by reflex action, manifesting an instinc-
tive and intuitive relationship with the world.
Often the physicality of this experience is
imprinted in the image itself, making the photograph
a testament of Moriyama’s physical presence within
the scene depicted – with, for example, Moriyama’s
own shadow or mirrored reflection claiming its place
within the frame. Some of the shakiness of his shot
of a red-light district (Figure 2), might be attributed
to poor night-time lighting conditions and the move-
ment of the figures within the frame – prostitutes,
maybe; a sailor, perhaps – but it is also highly likely a
direct result of Moriyama’s own movement through
the world as he clicked the shutter. There is no par-
ticular action performed by the “subjects” of this
image and hence no “decisive moment”. Belying the
idea of the photograph as an image of something out
there waiting to be faithfully recorded, the image now
bears the trace of the photographer’s own existence,
a record of a meeting between the photographer and
the photographed, an assignation with reality as vis-
ceral as it is visual. Moriyama writes, “photography
is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but

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FIG 2: Daido Moriyama, KARIUDO (Hunter), 1972. Black & white print.
© Daido Moriyama. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

a unique way of encountering genuine reality at the

point where the enormous fragments of the world
– which I can never completely embrace by taking
photos – coincide with my own inextricable predica-
ment.” (2007: 210).
Moriyama’s use here of the word “fragment”
is choice as he passes the detritus of the city – the
remains of ripped posters, flashes of shop window
displays, the anonymous, floating figures adrift in the
night. Like a circle with its circumference everywhere
and its centre nowhere, his images – incidental,

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dislocated, disconnected – often seem gleaned from

his peripheral vision, culled from the far corners
of his consciousness. Despite his immersion in the
world, there is also a sense of Moriyama not quite fit-
ting in, remaining something of the outsider. Like the
stray dog of one of his most celebrated images, gov-
erned by his impulses and desires, the streets are
Moriyama’s but he’s still at their mercy, as though
scavenging for scraps of experience. He describes a
kind of fetishism that draws him to his favourite or
least favourite things in a haptic sense, (2006: 103),
listing motorcycles, jukeboxes, mannequins and trees
amongst the former and jet aircrafts, houses and chil-
dren amongst the latter: “When I happen to see a jet
taking off, I feel like prostrating myself in terror, as
if I were a prehistoric man – but at the same time,
my heart pounds with a pleasurable sensation” (2006:
103). And like this prehistoric man, Moriyama also
seems to look in wonder at the camera itself – the ulti-
mate fetish object. In the gaps between Moriyama’s
words lurks a sense that he considers his ability to
make personal work with an apparatus as mechanical
and impersonal as the camera to be a kind of miracle.
Accompanying this awe is disbelief that these per-
sonal images can communicate with others, as
though his images are just amateur snapshots in a

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scrapbook, or a diary with its pages accidentally left

open – memories that evoke the atmosphere, or an
impression, of a time and place Moriyama experi-
enced, but meaningless to everyone else.
We may also want to consider that early in his
career, Moriyama was inspired not only by the street
photography of those including William Klein
and Robert Frank but also by Jack Kerouac and his
novel On the Road (1957). At one point in his career
Moriyama documented his own experience hitch-
hiking around Japan in a photo series that borrowed
Kerouac’s title as its own. Moriyama’s approach to
photography could be seen as akin to the way Kerouac
used words – a flow of sense impressions or a stream
of consciousness recorded not with a pen but with
the compulsive click of the shutter. The parallel could
be extended to equate Moriyama’s indifference to the
supposed rules of focus, exposure and composition to
Kerouac’s seeming disregard for accepted standards
of punctuation and grammar, as a similar sense of
urgency certainly seems to typify the work of both,
an urgency in which all niceties are seemingly lost in
the rush to capture the raw experience.
Yet, just as some critics have claimed Kerouac’s
seemingly spontaneous writings to actually be the
result of careful deliberation, so can Moriyama’s

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happy accidents be seen as resulting from a deliberate

use or misuse of the accepted protocols of camera and
darkroom. Not that Moriyama would admit to these
transformations as anything to do with aesthetics
or self-expression, but as having more to do with
“remembrance” (Shimizu 2002: 127). For Moriyama,
“the photographed real city and the city emerging
in the print – both of the two make a photograph”
(Moriyama cited in Shimizu, 2002: 127) and this coa-
lescing image in the developer forms a new memory,
enhancing and informing the memory of the original
scene.
Moriyama may dismiss aesthetics as relevant to
his pictures, but it is largely in the further manipu-
lation in the printing process – through cropping,
pushing tonal contrast and enhancing the flat image’s
granular texture – that his identifiable visual style
becomes pronounced. We need, then, to consider
Moriyama’s work as a fusion of at least two contra-
dictory tendencies, a seeming heightened immediacy
and proximity to “reality” at the point of execution
and at the same time as the result of certain aesthetic
choices (made later in the process, not so much at the
shooting stage).
The fact that any such sense of heightened real-
ism results from deliberate construction is a paradox

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that can largely slip the viewer’s comprehension.

Discussing cinema, Kendall Walton notes how some
film-makers “mimic the crudity of home movies,
using hand-held cameras, purposefully bad focus,
and so on” (1984: 269), citing John Cassavetes as an
example:

This reconciles the immediacy which is claimed

for such techniques – the feeling they provide of
intimacy with the objects portrayed – with the
obvious sense of contrivance that they engender –
their calling attention to the medium. Emphasizing
the medium is usually regarded as a way of
distancing appreciators from the world portrayed.
In this case it has just the opposite effect. (1984: 269)

This is certainly true. But the same low-tech appara-

tus and similar grainy, blurred imagery can also be
called upon to suggest the hazy cloud of memory –
consider, for example, the number of films that use
home movie techniques to depict not a heightened
realism but a fondly remembered, nostalgic past,
especially that of childhood. Moriyama’s images can
often be read both ways, and often seem to inhabit the
hinterland between the two. This act of defamiliarisa-
tion can involve a kind of enfolding, whereby even an

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image with overtly social/documentary interest – like

his shot of the 1969 street demonstration – can turn
upon itself, enwrapping itself in the foggy aura of
memory or dream.
There are yet other possible readings. Conversely,
it is possible to see Moriyama’s aesthetics not as an
attempt to enhance any claim to capturing “reality”
but as a challenge to the accepted modes of “realistic”
representation and the ideologies they reflect: “the
guerrilla tactics of secret subversion, of silent resist-
ance, of stubborn refusal.” (Eagleton, 1990: 369). Terry
Eagleton describes these tactics as emerging from the
“positive utopianism” of the left-aesthetic of Schiller,
Marx and Marcuse but at a point when it turns sour
– the “negative aesthetics” (Eagleton, 1990: 370) of
the moment of modernism. But Eagleton also notes
how this resistance is also too weak to successfully
mount a political challenge and changes course into
an art that “rejects the aesthetic” (1990: 370), which
is how we could view some of Moriyama’s most
extreme images (which begin to resemble the can-
vases of Jackson Pollock or other abstract painters).
Not least in Moriyama’s book Farewell Photography,
these images dissolve into granular, almost abstract
patterns of light, shadow and texture as objective
reality becomes virtually impossible to decipher, “an

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art which rejects the aesthetic. An art against itself,

which confesses the impossibility of art…” (Eagleton,
1990: 370) .
Moriyama’s search for truth needs to be seen
against the background of the paradox of his age,
whereby the limits of film technology often made the
very act of “getting in close” obfuscate and distort the
image – the raison d’être of the street photographers
discussed earlier. We need to consider what it means
for Moriyama that the closer the camera gets to the
object it depicts, the more it dissolves into a grainy,
indistinct field of dots, leading us further away from
the objective truth.5 If Moriyama’s generation was not
the first to experience such a dilemma – what we could
call a crisis of the image – it was perhaps the first to
feel it with such violence in key moments as the assig-
nation of John F. Kennedy and other public media
spectacles (the Vietnam War, etc.) in which available
photographic evidence completely failed to unyoke
the truth. Living against a backdrop of a simultane-
ously ever-more pervasive and increasingly deceptive
and alienating visual culture, Moriyama’s work simul-
taneously appears to reflect a desire to document the
world – or better, to know the world through pho-
tography – but seemingly also reflects an acceptance
of the impossibility of fulfilling that desire. Despite

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all this, Moriyama denies that his photographs are

“riddles to be solved, as if I were suggesting that the
graininess of the images represents the devastation
of the world or their shakiness the instability of
our age. I use the camera as a procedure by which
to continually reaffirm my identity…” (2007: 210).
After the doubts raised over the status of the image
not only in society at large but specifically in his
Farewell Photography, an almost apocalyptic near-
swansong for his chosen medium, the question arises
of how Moriyama could continue to face the world
and click the shutter in the belief that this enables
him to claim his own place in the world, to confirm
his own identity and reality through his own “inner
photography” (2006: 95). A further question arises of
how, in this media-saturated age, a photograph of a
peeling poster advertising a long finished stage show,
or a close-up of a newspaper being read by someone
else could be said to constitute an expression of his
own experience of the world.
To return briefly to Moriyama’s interest in
Kerouac, another objection to viewing the photog-
rapher as, unproblematically, a kind of “existential-
ist realist” (Shimizu 2002: 53) in the manner of his
hero, is that the very desire to take photographs in
the same direct, unmediated and intuitive manner

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as Kerouac wrote his novels is precisely the barrier

to achieving such directness. This very awareness
can only serve to mediate Moriyama’s unmediated,
experience suggesting Moriyama seeing the world, to
an extent, through Kerouac’s eyes as well as his own.
Moriyama is acutely aware of the impact of the medi-
ated nature of experience: “For me, following a long
gray line, a national road, can be compared to seeing
all the films and reading all the books” (Moriyama
cited in Shimizu,2002: 116-117), suggesting not only is
there no essential difference between the two but that
the former can never be separated from the latter as a
pristine, untouched experience. As the philosopher
Steven Katz argues, “there are no pure [i.e. unmedi-
ated] experiences...that is, all experience is processed
through, organized by, and makes itself available to
us in extremely complex epistemological ways” (Katz
cited in Odin 1995: 249).
But while this mode of existence could be seen as
a form of living by proxy and, as such, tinged with
a kind of sadness, there is sometimes a sense, with
Moriyama, that the adventure lies in the richness of
precisely this layered and inflected structure of the
visual world. Detailing his fascination, since child-
hood, for posters, billboards, film stills, illustra-
tions etc., he writes that he can’t be sure “if I really

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saw the landscape that I have now in myself as my

proto-image or if I just saw it as printed. I have often
regarded copies, the already copied world, as frag-
ments of reality which I then copied once more in my
photographs.” (Moriyama cited in Shimizu 2002: 119)
Well aware of developments and key figures in the
history of art and photography as Moriyama clearly
is, it is unclear the extent to which his pointing his
lens at, for example, a shop window display of man-
nequins is testament to the raw, individual experience
he claims it to be or is shaped or tainted by his recol-
lection of similar scenes shot by other photographers
– like Eugène Atget, for whom the mannequin was
also a favourite subject. Noting such paradoxes, the
critic Minoru Shimizu asks: “Could then Moriyama
be supposed to be a postmodernist referring to the
history of photography, in place of the existential-
ist realist who tried to approach the reality beyond
language ? Or, if there is no either-or between these
two… how do they co-exist in Moriyama’s work?”
(Shimizu 2002: 53). What could be ventured, at least,
is that Moriyama’s appropriation strategies do not
exhibit the de rigeur sense of irony or critical distance
typical of many postmodernist gestures of appro-
priation – strategies that frame, layer or interweave
appropriated imagery. Instead Moriyama’s aesthetic

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approach seems to flatten this distance, re-claiming

and re-purposing all these various images (includ-
ing those he appropriates) as direct experience, in
order to reclaim his connection with a reality that all
too often has been fragmented and stolen from us.
While it may not be possible to escape the fact that
all experience is mediated, perhaps not all mediated
encounters need be as alienating and desensitising as
they are so often presumed to be.
When we consider how this flattening takes place
– how it can take place at all – we can see memory
still at work. As Umberto Eco (1995: 213) suggests “it
is the visual work (cinema, videotape, mural, comic
strip, photograph) that is now a part of our memory”
and Moriyama’s photographs can be seen as explor-
ing the process through which this takes place. That
Moriyama’s photographs of that most modern exam-
ple of violent trauma – the car crash – were taken not
at the site of the accident, but were re-photographed
from images plundered from a road safety poster,
may seem to betray the immediacy of the event. But
if, for Moriyama, the event is not the car crash itself
but the impact on him of the poster at the moment
he laid eyes on it, this experience could be said to
constitute an accelerated, compacted moment that
transcends distinctions between perceived reality

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and mediated reality, and between document and

memory. A moment in which the image of the car
crash becomes inseparable from memories of past
car crashes, witnessed perhaps with his own eyes,
and through numerous TV shows and photographs,
memories of Andy Warhol’s screen prints of photos
of car crashes, and much more; all of these recalled in
that single instant and collapsed into one collective
memory/vision of the car crash.
Umberto Eco reminds us of “the extent to which
experience (love, fear, or hope) is filtered through
‘already seen’ images.” He continues: “I leave it to
moralists to deplore this way of living by intermedi-
ate communication. We must only bear in mind that
mankind has never done anything else…” (1995: 214)
citing illuminated manuscripts and pagan carvings
as the forerunners of the mass media of today. What
marks Moriyama’s attitude as different is not only his
active intercession into the world, and the world of
images, through his act of picture-making but also
the transformative nature of his aesthetic approach.
This approach allows him to reconnect with the world
he photographs (and re-photographs), transforming
and reclaiming, making the world his own again.
In this he is far from the prehistoric man cowering
in awe at technology, rather there is in Moriyama

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something of the shaman who, “using ‘twisted lan-

guage’, becomes able to understand, see and name
things in an exceptional way.” (Severi, 2002: 25). In
Moriyama’s photographs this process of transforma-
tion, facilitating the return of the image through the
portals of document and memory, becomes a way to
understand and personalise the incomprehensible
and impersonal world. Traversing the liminal spaces
between social and private, between document and
memory, Moriyama’s photography – at once direct,
raw and immediate, and also filtered, shaped and
transformed – provides us with work both deeply per-
sonal and yet universal in its reach. Moriyama’s pho-
tography demonstrates the mechanisms by which the
work of the photographer overcomes the paradoxes
inherent in it, and in his reflections upon it.

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“ The image is now

a record of a
meeting between
the photographer
and the photo-
graphed, an
assignation with
reality as visceral
as it is visual.”
NOTES – J M HAMMOND

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1  As the notes to the English translation of the text point out the Japa-

nese word for memory (kioku) and that for document (kiroku) sound

very similar and share, as does commemoration, the same first written

character, (which has a root meaning of script). 

2 We may or may not agree with this view, but it might be useful to

bear in mind that while the word photography in English, consisting

of the Greek words for light (photo) and for writing or drawing (graph),

carries connotations of communication, expression and, by extension,

even art, this is not necessarily the case in Japanese. Formed from

the Chinese characters meaning truth and to copy or to reflect, the

Japanese word for photograph (shashin), is conceptualised more as a

faithful record or document of the visible world, a linguistic construc-

tion that coincides with, or possibly provides a cultural backdrop to,

the conception of photography Moriyama lays out here.

3 These codes were established from early in photography’s participa-

tion in newspapers. Writing in 1939, Gunnar Horn notes the increased

use of photographs in newspapers in the preceding decade. He

stresses the “mechanics of the halftone print and the quality of

newsprint”, to compensate for which a photograph’s “outlines must

be clear, sharp; there must be strong contrast between light and dark

areas.” Horn also stresses the telling of a story and a composition and

arrangement that stresses the story’s “chief point” (1939: 727-728).

4 It is worth noting that Moriyama often has no titles for his photo-

graphs, or uses the general title of the project that a photograph

belongs to.

5 Unlike today’s digital technology that arguably can help clarify visual

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data through ever more detailed and high quality zooming, editing

and enhancing.

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Eagleton, Terry The Ideology of the Aesthetic Oxford:
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Eco, Umberto Faith in Fakes, Travels in Hyperreality,
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Moriyama, Daido “A Dialogue with Photography”
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Moriyama, Daido “From Document to Memory” in
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