Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
For me, capturing what I feel with my body is more important than the technicalities of photography. If the image is shaking, it’s okay, if it’s out of focus, it’s okay. Clarity isn’t what photography is about.
It may look like I’m just pointing the camera at what’s in front of me. But I’m trying to photograph what people see, but don’t notice – something that’s mysterious and unknown in everyday life.
The photographer who attempts to fit happily into the world by using the traditional perspective of the camera will end up falling into the hole of the “idea” he has dug for himself.
A photograph... isn’t conclusive the way language is. But that’s what makes photography interesting. There’s no point in making photographs that use language in an expository way.
The outside world is extremely fluid and mixed-up. Wrestling it into a “theme” is an impossibility. That mix in its totality cannot be photographed.
People steadily lose the landscapes they have accumulated. It’s not likely that anyone can faithfully recall how scenes appeared ten or twenty years ago... I think people continue to live in the present because we forget most every little thing. The remembrances that sneak up on a tired soul may sometimes stir us, but there is no tomorrow in that... Where in the world did the era beyond my memories and the people who lived in it disappear to? After time, which we can actually only see now in historical documents, there are memories we carry. After our time, what memories will be carried forth by the people who follow?
Photographs are pieces of the everlasting world—daily life—and fossils of light and time. They are also fragments of presentiment, inspiration, record, and memory about human beings and their history, as well as another language and world that becomes visible and intelligible through objectifying reality by means of cameras. They show us beauty and tenderness and also ugliness and cruelty now and then, not as the answer but always as a new question. I believe photographs to be pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Which is why I have been and will be devoted to photography.
I admit that photography can capture reality effectively and in detail, viewing a part of the world through its cold, scientific lens rather than with the eyes. But I prefer taking photographs without looking through the viewfinder.
