Moriyama · Shinjuku · Araki
Moriyama · Shinjuku · Araki ╱ Daido Moriyama & Nobuyoshi Araki
In August 2004, Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki walked through Shinjuku together, making new photographs for their first two-person exhibition. Several weeks later, on 28 September, their conversation began in an upstairs bar in Golden Gai and continued into the night in Kabukicho.
Much of the exchange circles around a small but significant distinction: photographing Shinjuku, and photographing in Shinjuku.
For Araki, the city repeatedly returns through people and personal history. Women, desire, dates, former cafés, hotel rooms and earlier photographs connect the present to encounters that have already passed.
Moriyama moves in another direction. Once the camera is in his hand, people, signs, utility poles and buildings enter the same immediate field of perception. His attention remains with what is visible now, while earlier subjects are readily left behind.
Their discussion also moves through contact sheets, framing and the idea of the decisive moment. Both resist the need to turn every encounter into a singular masterpiece. A street can be enough for a book; sustained shooting creates its own sequence and rhythm.
Published alongside the 2005 exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Moriyama · Shinjuku · Araki brings photographs made from the 1960s onward into contact with their 2004 work. Monochrome and color, past and present, Moriyama and Araki remain interwoven without resolving into a single view of the city.
Shinjuku continues through the book as an unfinished relationship between photography, place and time.
The full conversation is now available on Members Only in English, Japanese, and Traditional Chinese.
