Daido Moriyama

Beginning with its godfather, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the tradition of street photography has walked a fine line between spontaneity and artifice, brute reality and abstract geometry. Over the past fifty years, the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama has succeeded in turning this dichotomy inside out: In his luminous, highly theatrical oeuvre, reality itself emerges as an eminently aesthetic phenomenon, and the world of identifiable facts and objects is constantly in danger of metamorphosis or dissolution. Thus it seems logical that in his latest exhibition, the artist has turned his eye toward the always already aestheticized terrain of the Hawaiian Islands.

The ostensible subject matter of Moriyama’s large black-and-white prints includes some of the more obvious topographic and sociological features of the fiftieth state: lush tropical foliage, floral-print clothing, tourist groups, ocean vistas. Yet through expert manipulations of contrast, perspective, and composition, the artist systematically subverts the identity of these familiar, iconic subjects: Palm fronds take on the solidity of mountain ridges, a rock formation in a stream resembles a glistening internal organ, swimmers resting on the beach become impassive boulders. Meanwhile, human actions and interactions are presented as enigmatic, formalized gestures that recall ritual or abstract theater.

In one of the installation’s most telling juxtapositions, a close-up photograph of a conch shell abuts an image of a car’s rounded back end sunk into a tangle of vegetation; here, and throughout the exhibition, the artist pointedly refuses to recognize any meaningful distinction between the organic and the artificial, occurrence and contrivance. Moriyama’s work provides a vivid, often thrilling affirmation of Goethe’s famous dictum “The unnatural, that too is natural.”