Daido Moriyama: The World through My Eyes

I've been aware of Daido Moriyama's work for some time now and have been to a couple of exhibitions and bought some books.This book however has many images that I hadn't seen. It really illustrates how diverse in feeling Moriyama's work is over the years he has been working. It's a pretty heavy book of 345 pages and has images on every page. The paper quality is good and has a very nice feel to it. The light really does bounce nicely giving the images a very authentic Japanese photo book feel. The iconic Moriyama contrast of different shades of black and grey looks great and I have already had a nice few hours just losing myself in the hundreds of images.The book is really worth your attention if you are a new fan and want to see more of Daido Moriyama's work as there are really so many images in here that would take ages to digest.My only wish would be that the book was bigger by a few inches in height and breadth in order to make the images bigger. As it is it is still a very nice book though and very much worth your time.

This book contains most of Daido’s best photos in his career. As far as I can identify, the photos selected includes many from “provoke”, “Bye bye photography”, “Shinjuku”, “Sunflowers”, “Japan, a photo theatre”, “pantomime” and many more. All of these are the best photograph collections of Daido, and this book contains basically the best of the best. It is a great overview of Daido’s works, and is a great collection of his best photos. Of course it is better to have all his best series, but for someone like me that was too expensive to achieve, hence this would be a really good option if you really love Daido.

I think this book has been criticized for the wrong reasons by a former reviewer. Indeed, all landscape format pictures have been placed on two pages, which I usually also strongly dislike, but in this case, it didn't interfere with my reading experience for the following reasons:1. As a commentator already wrote, the book is a hard cover unlike other Moriyama titles, you can open it out flat without damaging the spine.2. It is obviously intended by Moriyama to present his photos in a full bleed, double-page, "in-the-face" style, which corresponds with his direct and rough images. I also have the book "Journey for something", and even in this large-format book, the landscape format images are spread on two pages.Furthermore, this book contains many of his most iconic pages, as usual remixed and combined in an interesting way. I like the paper they used, which feels much better than the newspaper-style paper of many of his reprints and also, in my opinion, the thick paper they used in "Journey".Conclusion: Highly recommended introduction to Moriyama's work.

This book is an excellent primer for readers looking for an introduction to Daido Moriyama's work. All the classics are here, including the stray dog. There are something like 250 pictures in this book, and unless you are a DM obsessive, some of them will be new to you. The interviews and biographies are fairly illuminating, but certainly won't blow your socks off.The only negative comment I can make is that the book is so thick that opening the central pages all the way out is very difficult without damaging the spine and binding, so viewing the double page spreads (of which there are many) is hard.Overall, this is a quality book, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in photography.

Why go to all the trouble to select these amazing images and print them well and then BIND THE BOOK SO ALL THE IMAGES GET CUT BY THE CENTREFOLD? It is the most obvious and ridiculous of mistakes, particularly for imagery as wild and chaotic such as this, and totally destroys the impact of the photographs. What a terrible shame, and what a dreadful mistake. I am very disappointed and am considering returning the book, even though getting hold of affordable books of Moriyama's work is so hard.

Excelente compendio de fotografias, con una entrevisa al autor y una biografia al final. La unica pega que le pongo es que algunas de las fotografias a doble pagina esta n un poco mal ajustadas.

Fantástica seleção de todo seu trabalho. Imagens que penetram em nosso inconsciente, como sonhos e pesadelos.Papel e impressão de ótima qualidade.

Daido Moriyama. You get him or you don't. If you get him you are going to love this book.

Dando per scontato che il lavoro di Moriyama può piacere o meno e considerando che chi acquista i suoi scatti sa cosa sta comprando, il mio giudizio è esclusivamente sulla impaginazione delle foto, che non avendo nessun margine e nessuna "separazione" sono poco godibili.In particolare quando stampati in due pagine affiancate (cioè visibili insieme) scatti così neri e "notturni" necessitano di essere "divisi" e non affiancati senza "separazione", cosa che a volte li fa sembrare un tutt'uno e non due foto distinte. Poco "leggibile".

This, the most recent book from Daido Moriyama, is a well curated and edited sequence of 250+ images spanning Moriyama's work from the early 1960s through present day. The book was originally available for pre-order on Amazon under the title "Provoke: Daido Moriyama". The release date was shifted from original estimates and when the book shipped the title was changed to "Daido Moriyama: The World through My Eyes". It is a thick well designed book beautifully printed on good stock. The images are well reproduced showing excellent contrast and detail. The book starts with a short interview of Moriyama, followed by an introductory essay laying the ground for the images, and then after the work itself, ends with a brief biography.If you collect Moriyama's work, this book will be a good addition to your collection. There is a vast quantity of images presented here. While the book shares images that have appeared in other books by Moriyama, the sequencing and context of images in this book is fresh and hypnotic. It is important that to note that although photography has become popularly known for the iconic individual image, work like Moriyama's is really best seen and understood in context of other images. His images thrive on sequence and derive fresh meaning from new sequencing.For those unfamiliar with Moriyama's work, I would recommend doing an initial Internet search of images to familiarize yourself with his images. If you know his work already, then you know it is remarkable, contrasty, grainy, rough, blurred and intensely moving. Some of the work is grounded in the decisive moment, while other images float in a timeless unfocused way over the ordinary. Many of the images are grounded in the specifics of japanese culture over the last 50 years, as such they may seem to western eyes inherently exotic. But to me what is really impressive is how Moriyama is able to take the most ordinary content and find a way extract a kind of revelation, a transcendence, that goes so far beyond the actual content of the image: photograph of a cow, a dog, or a group of cats is so much more than would be expected.These are not images that rely on traditional formalism or storytelling. The images require a rough kind of darkroom work to achieve the graininess and tonality that makes them work, and which allows them communicate what Moriyama intends. Black shadows and blown out highlights create a kind of luminance but one that is very different from the refined work of Weston or Penn. While there is a contiguous style, or active aesthetic, which holds all the work together, that aesthetic is not one of the "pretty". In fact I would argue that what holds the work together is a way of working and an ethic that governs the making of images. The ethic is of the artist being true to a way of seeing that passes reciprocally through himself, the camera, and the subject.The instrumentality that emerged in the west during the renaissance and enlightenment formed a dichotomy of subject and object which has pervaded western art and thinking for centuries and which resulted in "the gaze". I think what is ultimately so compelling about Moriyama's work is that his ethic defeats (or at least works against) the gaze and the instrumentality of the medium of photography. This is work that allows the artist to connect his inner-self to the world around him. Moriyama has talked about photographing with is body. Where a photographer and observer like Arbus used to camera to look out starkly at the world, Moriyama is able to use the camera to blend his consciousness with the world around him in an honest and naked way. This then effectively breaks down the subject and object dichotomy creating a state of oneness and totality representing the artist and the world of which he is an inextricable part.