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Daidō Moriyama
339 Plays8 months ago
In this episode, we explore the medium of photography through the lens - pun intended - of Daidō Moriyama's life work. We visited his exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery and we had very different experiences!
https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/daido-moriyama-retrospective
Curators: Thyago Nogueira and Claire Grafik
We chat a lot about what it means to look at street photography and what it might feel to be in the photograph itself. What if it was you who were on an exhibition poster? We discuss minimalist and maximalist exhibitions, but, mostly, Moriyama's unfussed and iconoclastic relation with the medium. He is just cool.
https://www.moriyamadaido.com/en/
@exhibitionistas_podcast
Music: Sarturn
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Transcript
Introduction and Audience Appreciation
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, hello, and welcome back to Exhibitionistas. I'm so glad you could join us. We're a new podcast, and we're seeing that more and more are joining and listening every week, and it means the world to us. We are thrilled. So thank you so much for listening
Dido Moriyama's Photography and Style
00:00:28
Speaker
in. This week, we'll be looking at Dido Moriyama. He had a big exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in London.
00:00:35
Speaker
If you haven't heard of him before, he's a Japanese photographer. He has a really distinct aesthetic, kind of known for being grainy, blurry, out of focus, which could sound terrible, but actually it's incredible. The episode looks at how photography intersects with memory and nostalgia and lots of other ideas that Dido Moriyama was looking at in his work.
Podcast Segments and Hosts Introduction
00:01:00
Speaker
You'll also hear a bit about our Week in Culture and Trigger Warning. If you loved Killers of the Flower Moon, you are going to hear a contrary opinion here. So thanks again for joining and I hope you enjoy the episode. Hello and welcome to Exhibitionist's podcast. We visit exhibitions so that you have to. We explore the work of an artist through their solo exhibition. I'm Emily Harding, an art lover and an exhibition goer.
00:01:30
Speaker
and I am Joanna Pianervis, a contemporary art curator and writer, and this is an episode that will focus on photography. So just to remind you, we visit exhibitions separately and then we talk about them recording our conversation for you to share some insights. One of us does some research, the other one
00:01:55
Speaker
goes along with it, asks questions, some of them silly, some of them profound, hopefully.
Cultural Discoveries and Personal Stories
00:02:02
Speaker
So but first of all, Emily, how was your weekend culture? So we have watched a couple of interesting things, but the thing that I have sort of rediscovered this week
00:02:13
Speaker
that I forgot I had on my phone was an app called radio. So it's like radio with several O's off the back of it. Yes, we are not sponsored by them, by the way. But if you want to sponsor us, we're here. Exactly. It's an app that you can
00:02:32
Speaker
Put in a certain country and a certain decade and you can listen to what would have been on the radio in that time. It is amazing. Shut the front door. It is the best. I was looking at Portugal in the 70s and all y'all had some great music. When I was born.
00:02:52
Speaker
I know, it was like such cool stuff. I mean, it's... Wow, we did have some good music. Great music. Who else? We had like a bunch of good ones. You know, I have a little anecdote about that because as you know, my parents live with us and we have an Alexa.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so now my dad goes into the kitchen. My dad does not speak English. I mean, he gets by. He knows a few words. And now I'm in my office, which is adjacent to the kitchen. And I hear him go into the kitchen and go, Alexa, play Sergio Godino. And then Alexa talks to him with her very soothing voice. Yes, you can play Sergio Godino in Amazon music. Do you want me to da da da? And he just goes, play.
00:03:44
Speaker
And she plays. She understands him. He does not understand her. I love that. Oh, that is so good. But yeah, it's like you can just put it on shuffle and it will literally, you know, the app itself has a map of the world. So you sort of touch the country that you want to listen to.
00:04:03
Speaker
and then touch the decade you want to listen to. Incredible. Or you can hit shuffle and suddenly you're hearing something from Mexico from 1952. Wow. It really is the best. I've found out about so much, you know, very old new music. So how about you?
Critique of 'Killers of the Flower Moon'
00:04:22
Speaker
How is your week in culture been? Week in culture? We've been super busy. But I still managed to find the time to watch Killers of the Flower Moon.
00:04:33
Speaker
Which is strange when you say you had a busy week because it is three hours almost. And it was excruciating to watch. It's a very, very hard watch. We were cranky afterwards, not only because the subject matter is really, really tough,
00:04:55
Speaker
but also because it's way too long. There's only so many times you can watch Leonardo DiCaprio pretend he has a chin and a downward grin. So, you know, I'm not into that kind of acting at all. It was too much. And I heard that the Native American actress, Lily... Gladstone. Gladstone, thank you. She was the one who advocated for having more Osage language.
00:05:24
Speaker
in the film and we were talking about racism when we talked about Guston and it's, I think it's one of those minor racist things where when you watch things on Apple TV and Netflix, foreign languages are never translated. So you don't have the subtitles at many times. You don't know what the hell she's saying.
00:05:42
Speaker
when the actress actually learnt Osage. It's not her language, she's from another tribe. She's Blackfoot, yeah. Anyway, Jack White is in there at the end, so that, you know... I know, that's right! Yeah, oh my gosh, I almost forgot about that because it is a small sliver of a very, very long film. I didn't feel the effusive
00:06:05
Speaker
Praise that everyone else felt i mean it was a really important story really beautifully beautiful to look at and i mean there's obviously some very very talented people involved you know all of that so you know from the get go
00:06:22
Speaker
that the De Niro and the DiCaprio characters are terrible people. And you, as a viewer, know that the white people are killing all of these Native American tribe members. You know that.
00:06:41
Speaker
And so there's kind of no, it's like, when are they going to find out is the question. But I think if they would have flipped it and told it from the Native American point of view. Yes, exactly. So that it's like, oh my gosh, people are dying. But wait, there's white people that are now members of my family. Could it be them? I don't know. The scene where they take agency,
00:07:06
Speaker
And the Lily Gladstone character goes to Washington and to say, hey, we're getting killed and no one's paying attention was like 45 seconds. Absolutely. And that's why I'm really enraged with the way Leonardo DiCaprio played that character, because he seems to believe that if you're stupid,
00:07:24
Speaker
it has to show on your face. And so we had that grin, that kind of like, you know. I know, I know. But I have a palette cleanser for you. I have another Native American series called Reservation Dogs. I've heard of this one. Yeah. Absolutely incredible. It is co-written by Taika Waititi. I forget who the other person is. Unforgivably, I apologize.
00:07:53
Speaker
And it is about teenagers in a reservation. I think it's the first production with mainly Native American people everywhere, not only in front of the camera, but also behind the camera. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. Where do you watch it? I watch it again, not sponsored by, but could be at Disney Channel. There's the hustle I like. Yeah, nice.
00:08:18
Speaker
So Emily, tell us about the exhibition today. What are we talking about?
Dido Moriyama's Retrospective and Influence
00:08:23
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. So we're talking about Dido Moriyama. He's a Japanese photographer. He has a retrospective at the photographer's gallery in Soho that runs until the 11th of February.
00:08:36
Speaker
And I didn't know a ton about him beforehand. Tony, our lodger in London, is a photographer and has a Dido Moriyama poster, the one with kind of all of the topless, shall I say, Japanese guys on the beach. And I really liked it. And I was like, oh, gosh, you know, I should go and see that. So Dido Moriyama is I mean, he's a real shape shifter of the art form. He was trying different approaches that were
00:09:03
Speaker
you know, loved and adored by some and unloved and unadored by others. He was really countercultural, provocative, very democratic. He made photos with reproduction in mind, which is an interesting concept considering he was really against sort of mass consumerism as a whole. And he was a maximalist.
00:09:24
Speaker
as I think you noted, as I saw briefly in your notes. You're not similar, as you say. I don't think so. The show is full. It's chock full. He's one of these guys that took pictures every day from the time he was 18 years old or something like that.
00:09:46
Speaker
But just a bit of background, so Moriyama was born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, and he moved around a bit with his parents as a kid, Tokyo, Hiroshima. So as you can imagine, he was born during the war years. Japan entered World War II in 1940 after it invaded French Indochina. It was a really good time to pick up trauma, wasn't it? Intergenerational trauma. Very good time. Or just trauma trauma. Yeah, absolutely.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, gosh, you know, I mean, speaking of movies, I mean, we've all seen Oppenheimer, right? Yes. Exactly. This is the other side of Oppenheimer. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, so the bombings were in 1945. The US occupied Japan until 1952. So, you know, in some of his formative years, his country was dealing with these mass tragedies, huge drama,
00:10:40
Speaker
and then economic obliteration, and then trying to come out of that. I mean, Japan was closed for a very long time before this, which makes this Western influence and this Americanism that came in after the war, I think, all the more of a stark relief to what was happening previously.
00:11:05
Speaker
So I say this because a lot of his work pushes against these ideas of mass consumerism and the Westernism that was taking place in Japan at the time. But he was also super influenced himself by Westerners. That's what I was going to say, pushes against or is completely fascinated by it. I don't want to compare Portugal with post-war Japan, but you know, I remember the first McDonald's coming to Lisbon.
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally. So I mean, you know, you see Andy Warhol, you see William Klein, you see Jack Kerouac having really big influences. Which are claimed by him, aren't they? Yeah. He claims those influences.
00:11:49
Speaker
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. So a couple of notes about his style and influence. Provoke magazine came out and Moriyama, there was only three issues. And thank you for saying that because I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who start magazines, who start projects, you know,
00:12:12
Speaker
And sometimes, I think even more than then, it's so hard to have funding for those projects. You have to pay an editor, you have to pay translators, you have to pay authors, you have to pay the designer. And sometimes magazines just have three issues. And 30 years afterwards, someone is doing an exhibition about it.
00:12:33
Speaker
It's very hard to have art magazines go on, especially the ones that are very niche in some ways, which I think Provoke was, wasn't it? So tell us a bit more about it. So I'll just say that Moriamus joined Provoke at the second issue. He wasn't there at the immediate founding.
00:12:50
Speaker
But while it was really short-lived, the magazine's influence on Japanese photography throughout the 70s and 80s was enormous. So you're right, it was niche. I think it was photographers who were looking at this magazine and seeing images that were not the glossy, fine lines,
00:13:12
Speaker
impeccably composed kind of images that you were seeing. Think of after the war and all of those post-war images that we would be seeing of clean kitchens and all of the wonderful appliances that anyone can buy and all that kind of stuff. These were really gritty images that tried to convey something very different than this sanitized image that photography was conveying.
00:13:39
Speaker
And their whole manifesto declared that visual images cannot completely represent an idea as words, but they can provoke ideas. They can provoke ideas and words resulting in a new language and a new meanings. I was trying to think about Moriyama and his context, which is not as accessible to us as, say, Brahmaviches, for example, who's European.
00:14:01
Speaker
And now that you've explained the context, I was thinking that it is true that Japan was so photographed. So you kind of feel like you are the sort of subject of something. And the people who are taking pictures might also be trying to assuage their anxiety about what happened to you as a country. And then suddenly,
00:14:23
Speaker
this kind of subconscious thing, traumatic thing, comes up, bubbles up, and it ends up being blurry photographs and just saying not everything is neat and we are living a period of inconsistency, of instability, outside and inside. So in some ways it completely makes sense why they claim photography to be that
00:14:48
Speaker
thing that is wordless, strange, it's just an image, and it's not very precise, but at the same time, it contains a lot of energy. Yeah. And that's exactly what they were going for. I mean, they had this R.A. Bure Bouquet, which means grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus aesthetic, which is really associated with Moriyama's work, although not all of his work was like this.
00:15:14
Speaker
But it is pushing against that refined image. And it's a style that tends to be super oversaturated, so really black blacks and super high contrast. I mean, he was working primarily in black and white. And there was a lot of noise in the development of the film, so a lot of crystalline, grainy texture in there that he wanted in there. He wanted that to be part of it.
00:15:42
Speaker
So it was more about feeling rather than a narration in an image or high technical refinement or prowess. I mean, he didn't use expensive cameras, so he was using
00:15:57
Speaker
just regular standard cameras and he was rarely using the viewfinder. So he was just taking images to capture what real Japan was like. Moriyama had this exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2012 before we get into this particular show just as a reference to kind of his approach. He had this show where people came and could make their own photo books of the exhibition.
00:16:26
Speaker
So it's like, yeah, so there's fantastic. Yeah, isn't it cool? So and he was there like at a copy machine making making the images. Was he smoking a cigarette? Because there's no video that I watched on YouTube where he's not smoking a cigarette.
00:16:45
Speaker
I know he was not smoking, but I'm sure in the Tate in 2012, they would have frowned on it. Exactly. Exactly. So people could go and just sort of pick out images that they wanted, pick up the order they wanted, get their own photo book made. He would make the cover there. It was really cool. He'd sign it. And you know, in the interviews with Moriyama, he was like, it was so exciting to see like, which image people would choose as
00:17:11
Speaker
first one and how they would sequence it and which ones they chose.
00:17:16
Speaker
So I would have preferred that show for sure. Yeah. But I what I love about that, though, is there just seems to be a real lack of pretense about I mean, he didn't he didn't call photography art. He just had this, you know, kind of democratic view of what he was doing and how people could engage with what he was doing. So just just to mention something that I think is really
00:17:44
Speaker
representative of his work, which is the image of the stray dog. Yeah, that's the most famous image. And to your point, he sees himself as the stray dog. So the stray dog photograph is really interesting because it is a dog that is in the sort of a weird kind of attacking or checking behind his back position.
00:18:09
Speaker
and he is ambivalent you don't really know if the dog is about to attack or if the dog is hungry and scared it's quite ambivalent but you know that the dog is just a stray dog so the dog is just gonna go and get whatever
00:18:28
Speaker
it needs, you know, it's just going to go about town and just get something and get food and follow people and sniff around. And that's who Moriyama, well, that's what Moriyama thought of himself. So he identifies with the stray dog, which I find really, really cool. Yeah, totally. And he I mean, that that dog isn't a dog you'd want to
00:18:52
Speaker
go and give a quick cuddle to. You wouldn't reach your hand out to that dog. It looks maybe a little bit menacing as you say, why is a question mark? I mean, is he hungry? Is he whatever is going on in there?
00:19:06
Speaker
But yeah, that was his thing, is he kind of felt like he's the guy who's just sort of a stray dog wandering around, capturing images. And yeah, that's how he felt. He was represented. And in the show, the photo is there as a negative, as a plate for printing. You almost can't see it. So maybe I'll get to the exhibition. So the photographer's gallery, first of all, is a peculiar exhibition space, which I love.
00:19:36
Speaker
You go in, you take the lift and you go straight to the top floor. And the lift is a trip. I have to say it is papered with a pattern of repeated eye photographs of Moriyama. So you're being looked at in this really tiny space and I'm slightly claustrophobic. So it felt strange, but a bit trippy. So I didn't dislike it. I really loved it actually.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and in this elevator, you could maybe fit five people max, max, max, you know, if you're really, you know, okay with touching shoulders and all that kind of stuff. So it's a really tight, tight space. It's a tight space. So you really feel looked at. And then it suddenly the doors open and you are the one looking. So that is really, really
00:20:27
Speaker
pleasurable. You feel it in your body. You feel that you're being observed that then suddenly it shifts and you're going to be the one looking and you are looking. Boy, are you looking in this exhibition. Moriyama's photography is black and white. So you feel that someone from the past is eyeing you as well because the eyes come back quite a bit. There's a lot of eyes in this photograph. It's very strong. But then, you know, that's when it stopped for me. I felt so assaulted by all the imagery.
00:20:57
Speaker
the text, captions, paragraphs about several aspects of the photography on top of this aggressive wallpaper on which framed or unframed photos sat, series, single photos. It was overwhelming for me. It was as if you were trying to put several pages of the same catalogue onto a single, quite confined space because the photographer's gallery is on several levels.
00:21:26
Speaker
But the spaces, the rooms are not that big. It was very full, very intense, albeit, you know, granted fascinating flaws. And I guess this is the curator in me, you know, doesn't mean that I don't like exhibitions that are very messy, but I really demand of the horror of vaquis to be
00:21:47
Speaker
you know, consistent and to tell me something, to be there for a reason. And I didn't quite understand why. And what was asked of me, I think it was very demanding on the spectator because I don't like to stand still for so long reading text and the text for me overpowered the images.
00:22:06
Speaker
that it's almost as if you didn't trust the work to carry itself. I understand that that's his ethos. And he has been thinking about the medium of photography for very, very, very long. He's not precious about photography. For him, photography is a file that then you can stretch, you can wallpaper, you can have in books. But to be very honest, I left the exhibition thinking I would have been fine with the book.
00:22:35
Speaker
which I don't think is a universal experience. I think it's my experience. I get very easily overwhelmed. I think I have a lot of neuro sensitivities. Yeah, no, it is overwhelming. I mean, and I think because he's someone who took pictures every day and was so prolific, the exhibition was an expression of part of that as well. I mean, you could say that about any exhibition. I mean, Philip Gustin,
00:23:01
Speaker
created loads more works than were in the retrospective. You could have easily just thrown up everything. Yeah, exactly. Before I went, I was talking to Tony about it, who had already been and bought this poster. And he was like, yeah, I spent three hours there.
00:23:19
Speaker
And I was like, wow. I mean, I love exhibitions. I don't think, I've never spent three hours at an exhibition. I mean, for one, it's like, it's a lot of information to take in. I leave a lot of exhibitions a little bit overwhelmed. It's a lot of ideas that are- Me too. Yeah, me too. That are captured. That's why I really think that the exhibitions that you have to pay for, the ticket should allow you to go back at least once more.
00:23:45
Speaker
because if museums are in crisis all the time always complaining they don't have enough people coming in but if they allowed people to use the space as a meeting place as a place that you can go back to a place where you can spend time
00:24:03
Speaker
but not having to pay 50 pounds to go back. And to the credit of the photographer's gallery, the tickets are not very expensive. I think I paid like eight, it was less than that. I think it was eight. I know it's expensive for some people and I understand that. But to be honest, it just felt really good to pay a ticket and think maybe I'll need to come back and it won't be horrible if I come back.
00:24:33
Speaker
I really do think that museums should think about that. Sorry, I keep saying the same thing, but maybe they'll listen at some point. But I guess from their perspective, I guess they'd say, well, buy a membership and you can come back as much as you want, whenever you want. I mean, that might be their argument, but still- I think a museum's about to hire you, Emily.
00:24:56
Speaker
I'm bucking for a position here, yeah.
Museum Experience and Art Accessibility
00:25:01
Speaker
But you're right, because I think, you know, there are some... I mean, I really love photography. I don't know that I would go to enough exhibitions at the photographer's gallery to warrant a membership. So, I mean, and the ERA as well, it's like I, you know, I think it's just the Tate Modern that I have a...
00:25:21
Speaker
have a membership for and i think you know i make good use of that between peter and i going you know that that certainly pays for itself.
00:25:30
Speaker
So yeah, I agree. It was a really overwhelming, intense exhibition. But I loved it. See, I loved the images. I mean, I loved some of them more than others. A lot of nice butts. He could take a picture of a nice bum, which I appreciate. So some of those were interspersed throughout. The room that really got me, and rather than kind of going room by room,
00:25:58
Speaker
because it was a chronological exhibition, right? So it was the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. I mean, not the 90s, because he had a huge breakdown and he stopped working, I think in the 90s for about 10 years. Yeah. He was the light and shadow room. So I think this was, so he did a big set piece of work that was about kind of deconstructing photography.
00:26:26
Speaker
And that's where he looked through cast off images and made a photo book out of those. So there was that. And then after that, he was sort of a return to having objects in his images. He was looking at memory and nostalgia.
00:26:46
Speaker
And oh my god I walked into this room and it was just I felt floored you know and it was pictures of a hat you know pictures of a you know a barefoot on a sofa you know kind of all of these things that are sort of everyone has a whole file of these random images in their minds
00:27:08
Speaker
of things that they remember and you don't know why, you know, um, there's like part of an animal. I mean, one of my very first memories as a kid is of melting snow. So I grew up in Minnesota. So, you know, I mean, that's Fargo land.
00:27:24
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. So in the springtime, all of the, you know, snow, the base snow that's covering everywhere gets this quality of being, you know, kind of part ice. And, you know, you can just start to smell the ground underneath that's just starting to get it's, you know, get unfrozen. But I feel like walking into that room,
00:27:50
Speaker
he had managed to capture all kinds of things that are in our collective memory somehow and put it on film. And I was really, really blown away by that. I think the thing for me is that I think every medium has its demons. And I think photography's demon is banality.
00:28:16
Speaker
I hate to say this after what you just said that was so beautiful and speaks to the power of images, really. Images can do stuff for you, and images that have been curated, that have been post-produced, because he did take pictures without looking into the viewfinder, and then he works on them. And he's not pernickety about it. He shows us so many videos of him editing
00:28:44
Speaker
images, turning a color photograph into black and white. There's a sentence, I was reminded of that when he said, you know, black and white pictures are much more interesting to me, they're more nostalgic, because he's all about nostalgia. And I remembered a sentence by Joseph Kasut, who was one of the founders of conceptual art saying, when you're trying to make a point, there is no place for color. And I wondered, is that why he's going
00:29:11
Speaker
for black and white or is nostalgia or is it about memory? Because he does work, you feel, I mean, he lost a twin brother when he was a child. He does not, notoriously does not want to talk about himself and his personal life, but you know a few things about him. And his wandering eye and his wandering body through the city kind of tragically makes you feel that he's looking for something. And so
00:29:39
Speaker
it's a bit daunting what I'm about to say, this idea of the cliche. And what you were saying is that, but, you know, the cliche, the word cliche, and in French you can say un cliche photographique, comes from a printing process. So it's kind of the plate, it's not really exactly the plate, but it comes from a very specific kind of printing technique.
00:30:01
Speaker
So, the idea of the cliche is that the first time you see an image or a figure of speech or a metaphor, you think this is fantastic, it's genius, and then it just fades away and it empties itself from its meaning like a
00:30:21
Speaker
repeatedly printed image can lose something. And for me, the demon of photography is the cliche, is that thing of you have your women looking vaguely sexy and vaguely busy in the city, you have your naked bodies, you have your stray dogs, you have your cookie spaces, which there's a lot of them in Japan,
00:30:42
Speaker
You have interiors, you have flowers on a table, and this is just a cliche of photography. And with so many images in the exhibition, I had a hard time working towards feeling something and getting attached to something at some point. This word cliche kept coming back to my mind. He talks of himself as a hunter, which
00:31:06
Speaker
know, is an attitude. And so that turns the subject matter of his photographs praise. And in some ways, we talked about that poster of it's a diagonal of torsos, of male torsos bathing in the sun.
00:31:25
Speaker
It's a beautiful photograph. And I kind of think, what if it was me in that photo? It's somewhere in Tony's kitchen or your kitchen in London. What if it was me? And I was just part of the, of the urban scape. And it was just one of those vaguely sexy, vaguely busy, vaguely opaque people. I'd be probably rolling my eyes and thinking, oh, there I am in another exhibition poster.
00:31:51
Speaker
But I would feel strange about it. I would feel, why am I taken as a thing? I like choice. I like framing. I had just seen the exhibition of another Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and he is the opposite. He has an idea, conceptualizes it, and then he travels, and then he goes, and then he goes to archives, places, and he takes pictures, and he chooses them very carefully.
00:32:21
Speaker
He prints them in very big, he frames them and they're there and you're confronted with a huge size of something that usually is very small or you just look at it passing or that you didn't pay attention to and he just forces you to stay for a long time. We stayed for a long time in that exhibition and you just look and you just, you know, every time you look and the time you spend with them, it's all about time.
00:32:46
Speaker
the time you spend with them and the care that you end up developing, because curating is caring, isn't it? Maybe I think like a curator. And you just give yourself in another way. And I didn't enjoy everything of Sugimoto's. Obviously, it's not everything, but I appreciated the project, I think, a bit more. That's really interesting. But I guess one thought about the
00:33:12
Speaker
Kind of cliche mess cuz I understand what it's we've seen this before in a way but is that part of the thing about being one of the first people didn't have cameras to that Level and degree in the 60s,
Originality and Influence in Art
00:33:27
Speaker
right? So he was one of the first who was making images that were like this and then it was replicated and
00:33:34
Speaker
Andy Warhol, one of his big influences, I mean, everybody's done some kind of version of the stuff that he was doing to the point where you're just like, if somebody came out with anything remotely like that now, it would just be a giant yawn, you know, unless they were offering something new on that. I mean, he was one of the first in a certain context. Okay, so art historian coming in, I do object to the first thing. It's a very big trope.
00:34:00
Speaker
in art history that we're trying to deconstruct a little bit, abstraction. Kandinsky was the first painter to produce a complete work of abstraction, of an abstract painting. He turned the painting upside down, he looked at it and he thought this is it and that's what he started doing. And he was
00:34:20
Speaker
claimed to be the inventor of abstraction for many, many years until we discovered Hilma Afklimt, a woman. She did it a few months before it comes to that thing of the influences. Oh, so-and-so influence what? And then you don't, you're not talking about the project, you're not talking about the art, you're just talking about the race.
00:34:39
Speaker
of technically being the first to do this and that and when it comes to photography and that's what I love about photography is that yes William Fox Talbot for sure so many other people were inventing photography actually photography was being invented since the 17th century
00:34:55
Speaker
And the issue was the emotion was fixating the image, was making it not move. So this idea of being the first, I mean, if you look at Brassai and all the photos he took, one of the surrealist photographers, he took pictures of the graffitis in the street, for example, you have Ouija with the accidents, with the car crash.
00:35:21
Speaker
photographs in I think the late 40s, it was much earlier on. So in some ways, I think, you know, I've seen a lot of Moriyama's images
00:35:33
Speaker
A lot of this and that, you know, Ouija, of course, with the car crashes came to mind and I'm not a specialist in photography by any means, I'm a specialist and I'm not a specialist in anything, I'm a forever student of everything and I forget a lot of things. I do understand what you're saying and I understand what you're saying that, you know, when you're trying to propose another aspect to photography, another
00:35:57
Speaker
I think for me the great innovation and the beauty of his work is really this idea of not being
00:36:03
Speaker
precious about photography and wanting to see it stretched in many ways and even becoming wallpaper. A certain dose of iconoclasm was needed about photography because as you say, people get really pretentious about photography. Rather than speaking about influences or being the first, I think he opened a new territory. I prefer to speak like this and to say that he's opening something else, new possibilities that he saw somewhere in art history as well. He saw somewhere in the history of photography and surrealism for sure.
00:36:33
Speaker
and in many others, I mean, I'm sure you go to Mexico, maybe we need that app, that radio app for art history. Just go to a country and just focus and say, oh, okay, so this Vietnamese person was also doing this, you know, because everything's being done at the same time and everything's been done. But then you have technology that kind of creates new temperatures, new languages,
00:37:00
Speaker
new mechanisms, new tools to make images, because this is all about images, right? But yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I, you know, and even if we had a radio for art history, you know, it would still be sub... Let's do that. Do you know what? Let's stop this podcast and just do that app, you know? Immediately, immediately. It will give us money, immediate money. Let's do that.
00:37:24
Speaker
It's also who curates it as well, which is the bigger issue. But I guess it's not so much that he was a first, as you say.
00:37:39
Speaker
surely wasn't. There were other people doing other things, but maybe it's the fact that he gained some notoriety in his time and therefore other photographers were more aware of it and therefore more interested in replicating a style that they had seen. There are other photographers working with him in Provoke, for example.
00:38:00
Speaker
Well, not as frantic and neurotic as he is. Let me try and find the name of one of them that I really, really love. I think it's Takuma Nakahira that he describes as his only friend and his only rival. They would have had a good podcast. They would have had a great podcast. There's also the thing about photography is that sometimes there's this idea
00:38:28
Speaker
The photographer is almost like a rock and roll character. There's also the persona of the photographer and he doesn't want to talk about himself, but there's a lot of videos. There's a lot of documentaries where he speaks, where people follow him into the messiest and the most nondescript studios you will ever see. He's quite interesting. I was intrigued by him. I was like, this man intrigues me.
00:38:54
Speaker
At the same time, it irritates me a little bit, I have to say, because he's just there with his cigarette and just being cool. He's just cool. He's in the street. He's walking around town. He knows everyone.
00:39:08
Speaker
You can see that he's just kind of trying to create connections but also being very disconnected. It's very interesting to see and I would urge our listeners to go and watch some of the videos on YouTube and even in the exhibition. That was one of the things as well. You have videos of the curator talking, you have videos of the... That's why you have to spend so much time in this exhibition because there's a lot of information about him.
00:39:34
Speaker
and trying to create a myth which curators keep doing, which I find really annoying, as you know, of the greatest, he's the greatest photographer. No, he's not. He's absolutely not. He's just one photographer. He's an amazing photographer. He absolutely deserves all the accolades he got. I lost my track of my, what was I saying? I get nasty and then I get, I feel a bit self-conscious of being too nasty. Oh yeah, the character, the persona of the photographer. Like the persona of Andy Warhol.
00:40:03
Speaker
he developed this persona. And he had this philosophy as well, Andy Warhol, which was the, so what, if you read, I don't know if you read his book, I think Andy Warhol's philosophy from A to Z and back again, something like that. And so he talks a lot about just being disconnected, and just being, you know, cool, and creating that coolness. And so he says, you know, all of the things in life,
00:40:28
Speaker
that you say really intensely, like, for example, you know, oh, something that happened to me last week. My husband almost died. You just say at the end of the sentence, so what? And it changes everything. For him, that changed everything. And I sometimes try to do that when it's smaller things. It's almost a Buddhist thing in some ways, but it becomes a cool thing. I don't know. I'm confused, Emily. I'm very confused about this.
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, yeah, I mean, there's, there's definitely myth making. I guess if you're a curator, don't you kind of have to do that to engage people to come? Yes, you're very right. I think the problem is that with big institutions, that's the way we found to, you know, attract people, you just tell them it's the biggest, and they will come because they want to know the biggest so that they don't have to find that anyone else.
00:41:25
Speaker
And I think that's dumbing it down. It's really disrespecting the audiences rather than doing a little bit more work and trying to see what could people relate to in this person's history. And I would have just said, he was the precursor of what we all do nowadays, which is to take a bloody iPhone and take pictures constantly.
00:41:52
Speaker
why don't you say that? But he did it in another way. And he really looked at those images that we don't look at. And he's going to make you look at those images. So in the work that I do, it's about curating conversations about different aspects of international relations. So a different, very different field. But it just got me thinking. Finally, finally disclose it. Ah.
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. What does Emily do apart from being an exhibition girl? Is that a job? Yeah, is that a job? Is that what she does? Just swans around exhibition to exhibition, having lunch. Yeah, God, I do too. How do I get that? The thing that's always in my mind is like, why is this the most important conversation to have now?
00:42:41
Speaker
And there's always trying to build that urgency into why this now. And there is a tendency to want to go to superlatives with that. But thinking of the Andy Warhol question of, so what? So it's kind of like, so what if we don't have it?
00:43:01
Speaker
You know, I mean if we don't talk about this now then and approaching the framing of it from that so what if Dido Moriyama never existed? What if what if we didn't have this? That's a very you know, this this exhibition we might not see where a lot of
00:43:23
Speaker
you know, the American and Japanese. This is obviously a point where Japanese and American artists are crossing paths and influencing each other. You know, we might not see an origin point of that. And then that can kind of start to frame, you know, what it is he was and what he was about. If we didn't have this exhibition, we might not see an approach to photography that was
00:43:48
Speaker
much more laissez-faire and in a way democratic because of his emphasis on reproduction and stuff like that. You know, I don't think about curation. I mean, like, you know, I just... How dare you? How dare you? My kids ask me constantly, what it is that you do, Mom, again? Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.
00:44:09
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, thinking about how we come, what is it that it's going to make one want to spend an hour or whatever, walking through an exhibition. And we do pull on those, dare I say, patriarchal notions of what is the best, what is the most exemplary. There is innovation. Again, he started with a group
00:44:39
Speaker
Because one of the things as a curator that I always think about is like when it's a very, I try to avoid the P word, you said it, so this patriarchal notion of the best and the first and you did it better.
00:44:57
Speaker
is very arranging to a certain profile of artists and obviously always the inventor, so the inventors are mostly male, and also there's groups of artists, and that's much more difficult to promote because then who invented what, you know, we talked about artist duos when we talked about Marina Abramovich and Ole, and it gets blurry, it gets blurry and actually provoke, you know, the group
00:45:27
Speaker
was actually the innovator. And then he picked that, and he took it somewhere very specific, he took it to his own language, and his own unique relationship to your image. And I do think he was thinking about cliche, he was he was thinking about I mean, no wonder I stopped working and he stopped photographing, you know, so that's, for me that that's it, you know, and it's the content, it's the
00:45:52
Speaker
the stories that we're talking about that are so important. It brings me back to Killers of the Flower Moon. Because again, it's that Scorsese has that thing with DiCaprio and these kind of tokens of quality that Hollywood wanted to believe in.
00:46:11
Speaker
I think the way you frame things is very important. To your question, again, in art history, we are asking that question of what if that person hadn't existed but about really problematic artists? For example, I was always really, really annoyed by Picasso because every Picasso lecture I had was a very excited male person talking about the greatness of the man.
00:46:34
Speaker
And because I am artistic director of Drawing Now Art for, I can also disclose that. I mean, people know the ones who know me, the ones who don't, they know now. I work a lot with drawing. And there's a big Picasso exhibition now that everyone knows that he was a P-word.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah. And I won't say what the P word I'm referring to. To many women in his life, you know, the relation to Picasso is somewhat different. But of course, in France, there's, you know, there was this decision of doing an exhibition about Picasso's drawings. And as someone who works for drawing, of course, I went and saw it.
00:47:12
Speaker
And I think we should be doing Picasso exhibitions, by the way. I think we just need to frame the history and reduce the
00:47:21
Speaker
The hype, let's say. Just the purlatives, yeah. The greatest, the best ever. The best ever. So I went there and I was like, oh, I'm going to hate to love this thing because he was an amazing artist. He was, yeah. Actually, I just visited the exhibition and there were so many tropes of cubism, of that so many others were doing. He focuses a lot on the figure. He's all about animals and women.
00:47:44
Speaker
which coincidence? Who knows? And I'm a vegan, love animals, but you know, love women too. But you know what I mean? Like it's, and it wasn't that mind blowing. And that is that thing of what if you hadn't existed, you know, maybe you would be looking at his wife who we forbade to show her work, you know, his, his last wife, I think. Some other artists who were so good, so amazing, so interesting, but who weren't
00:48:15
Speaker
telling, building their own myth as they went, you know. So yeah, so we are asking that question. What if that person didn't exist? What if we didn't give so much time and so much money to this? So question for you as someone who deals a lot in drawing. Oh. Do you think, do you, I mean, would you class what he does as a mark making?
00:48:41
Speaker
Oh, oh, question after my own heart. So if we go into the history of photography, photography is defined by what was called indexical in Charles Sanders Peirce semiotics. He was the first one who, he was the inventor of semiotics to go against everything I just said. I love Peirce. And semiotics is
00:49:09
Speaker
And semiotic is the study of science, to put it in a very, very simple way. So the idea, or also the decision to look at everything we do to communicate as a sign. Because then there was linguistics that kind of reduced semiotics to language and to words. But Pierce is incredible because, I mean, it's too complex to read. It's really difficult to read. But what he did was to, and I'm just going to focus on these ones, he focused on, you know, aspects of what a sign could be.
00:49:39
Speaker
So a smile can be assigned for him. And that's really interesting because then it means that nature communicates. It's not just a human thing. So bees communicate, et cetera. Trees communicate. Everything communicates. Everything makes sounds, images, et cetera. So Charles Pierce defined three aspects of assign, let's say. So the index, the icon, and the symbol. The icon is something that resembles something.
00:50:06
Speaker
The symbol is something that is accepted as a sign by convention. So if I say car, we all accept the car is the sign for a car.
00:50:15
Speaker
and it has no connection to the object whatsoever. And then the index is really interesting because it's made by the thing. So say, for example, a footprint is an index because it was made by the thing that it represents, let's say. It's intrinsically connected to the thing it represents. And so photography is an index because it is made by light and by a chemical reaction on a film, on a surface,
00:50:43
Speaker
a pixel interpretation, let's say, of what the light is bringing into the camera. Because as we know with digital photography, it is not like analogic photography, because with digital photography, the machine, the device interprets the information and sometimes remakes it. So it's not a complete mock, let's say, it's a collaboration.
00:51:04
Speaker
And mark and so of course photography was seen by as mark making and these theories around photography Emily whoa they go very very far it's a little bit like in the Renaissance the theories of these annual drawing when you read them you think okay I'm looking at a drawing of a dog and then I'm reading that actually that's a concept.
00:51:26
Speaker
what's happening. And it's the same with the theory of photography. It goes very, very far. So photography is definitely not making because you are registering something on the surface that happened. It is a bit of the thing. So what is interesting as well is that it's not man-made.
00:51:47
Speaker
you can make it by just pressing a button. So it's a machine. And that's the big difference between whatever you did before with art and what you're starting to do in the 19th century, which is that using machines. So for me, photography is a piece of technology, but I call a pencil a piece of technology. So for me, everything that is made to assist us is technology. And technology is something that
00:52:16
Speaker
produces something that you couldn't have done without it. So some people think that technology is just an extension of our limbs. Without it, you couldn't do what artists are doing. You couldn't draw a diagram on the sand. It would be too complete with your finger. So it is a completely different thing. And it defines us as humans. We are technosapiens. That's who we are. So the difference between photography and
00:52:44
Speaker
the pencil and how they can kind of inform each other is that when you suddenly look at the machine and think of the pencil, you think, oh, I couldn't do anything without the pencil. I couldn't do anything that I'm doing. The pencil is a form of technology. So it kind of in some ways raises the importance of the pencil to me. But at the same time, when you look at the camera through the perspective of the pencil, you think,
00:53:13
Speaker
Actually, technology is whatever you want to do with it. That's why asking what is photography for me is a bit pointless, because technology is what you make of it within the frames, the frame or the confines of its own specificity. You know, a pencil is not a camera and a camera is not a pencil, but they have things in common. So William Fox Talbot called his the first book ever published with with images. That's why Moriyama, yes and no.
00:53:41
Speaker
So he did publish a book of photographs and he called it the pencil of nature because he had the idea of photography while he was drawing. He was using a prism to draw. So the prism is a little box that through a savvy system of holes and light reflects what you're looking at onto a surface. And then you put some paper in it and you draw
00:54:06
Speaker
whatever you're looking at. And he was such, even with that, he was such a poor drafts person that he just thought, why can't I just have that that is reflected? It is drawn by nature. So for him, photography was a drawing of nature, which is really interesting. Yeah, totally. Fantastic. Thank you for that. That was really interesting. You know, I was in the nostalgia and memory bit, the light and shadow portion that was our favorite.
00:54:34
Speaker
It just got me thinking of he is taking images of those moments that pass us by, but are somehow all in our collective memory file bank somewhere. And a few years ago, I was in Paris with my mom. She came to visit. We took the Eurostar over. It was November. It was rainy. We were in the back of the cab in the evening, so it was quite dark out.
00:55:03
Speaker
And i was just taking pictures out the side window with my iphone as everybody does and is so distasteful but but the and some of the images that i got on the camera were things i didn't even remember seeing properly interesting yes.
00:55:22
Speaker
You know, I was so surprised at what came back and I was, you know, I mean, it was literally just, you know, point and shoot much like Moriyama did. But I was thinking about, you know, how many things he has represented
00:55:42
Speaker
That it's like, would we even, they're in our catalog somewhere, but we will have no memory of them being there. All these images that my iPhone captured, I guess are in there somewhere, but I don't remember them and I wouldn't have if they hadn't been down. But yet, it sort of connects me to a time and place. I mean, honestly, from that trip, it's like there are certain moments I remember with my mom.
00:56:08
Speaker
But because I caught those images in the back of that, you know, cab, like that is a really deep visceral. I remember that cab ride so distinctly because I have that record of it as opposed to, you know, I have obviously have lots of records of my mom and I smiling in front of Notre Dame, for example, I don't remember.
00:56:31
Speaker
as you do. This was pre-fire, thankfully. Yeah, I was thinking of that. Yeah, no, happier times for Notre Dame. So I have those images, but I don't have the same connection to them that I do somehow from kind of this rainy night when I got those really surprising images.
00:56:56
Speaker
But yeah, so it's a very good point. Yeah, it's a very good point you're making because it is true. And to be fair to Moriyama, because I did say a lot of, you know, I was a bit critical. He is drawing attention to the fact that those are just images. But when you say just an image, it means that it was recorded and it is the mark of that moment. And it has as much of the moment as it has of the loss
00:57:26
Speaker
of the moment and even the loss of your memory of it. And he is really interested in memory and nostalgia. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's a quote from Moriyama that kind of reminds me of what you're talking about. He says, for me, capturing what I feel with my body is more important than the technicalities of photography.
00:57:47
Speaker
If the image is shaking, it's okay. If it's out of focus, it's okay. Clarity isn't what photography is about. And I mean, not that the feeling in your body thing is what is popping out to me from this quote. So, you know, you are photographing an external image from an internal place. And he tries to break the intentionality by not looking into the viewfinder.
00:58:15
Speaker
and he tries to make it as organic and as unintentional as he can, while at the same time being stimulated by something. He has to make a choice at some point, but he's collaborating with the camera. So he's kind of making a choice and the camera is making its own choice as well. And another thing that he's really good about is that he's
00:58:42
Speaker
unfazed by the digital cameras. He can use them, he doesn't care. He even suggests to other photographers, just use, take pictures, use, use, use, use the digital cameras, just go outside. That's his advice to everyone. Just go outside, explore, just go and take pictures, which for me has something tragic to it. Take it, you know, it can be good, it can be bad. And there's sort of a
00:59:11
Speaker
a thing of looking for something that you cannot quite find, but it's the process, it's the journey. It's like Ulysses. It's just like, it's the whole thing of going and then going back as he went back to the place where he was born and took pictures.
00:59:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think there is something, I really like that notion. My friend Tony taught photography at UAL and that's something that he encourages his students to do. He's teaching street photography.
00:59:43
Speaker
I mean, that's a different thing than if you were teaching portraiture. I think that the advice might be a little bit different. But I think for him, when I've heard him talk about this, it's like just getting people to develop their taste. And the way to develop your taste and what your eye is honing in on is just to go out there and take as many pictures as you can and then get them back and see what you think.
01:00:14
Speaker
So there's that part of it. But then I think also for street photography, there is just the psychological hurdle to get over that you're doing the thing that you talked about at the beginning of like, how would I like to be one of those people on the beach and an object in somebody else's, you know, kind of aesthetic motivation or whatever it is that's, you know, making them just feel beautiful. I think about it. Did you watch Schitt's Creek?
01:00:41
Speaker
Oh, God, I loved it. Yes. Oh, God, I love it. I think I've watched and re-watched that thing way too many times. Yeah, easily done. And Moira Rose says something. She says, I have an advice for you, baby. To her daughter, Alex. Alexis, Alexis. She tells Alexis, get nude pictures of yourself now while you tiddies are perky because
01:01:07
Speaker
He'd never have that chance again. And she was so upset that there were no news of her on the internet.
01:01:16
Speaker
I love a bit of Moira. Yeah. I just talked about my own relationship with it. And that's what, you know, someone else may just feel like I would have loved to be in that picture. I would have loved to have my body at 25 or 27 just recorded in its magnificence, just burning in the sun. You know, I think he tries his best.
01:01:41
Speaker
not to over-define what he's about. And that's why he doesn't want to talk about his biography. And I think that's what I admire in him. He has that thing of just really, for better or for worse, he's married to photography in illness and in health. He's just there. He just trusts it, sometimes doesn't, breaks down, goes back again, and he wants something out of it.
01:02:07
Speaker
And I think that's why I spoke of tragedy in the literary sense, not really like, oh, it's tragic, you know, in the sense of it's bad, it's just so stupid. No, like a real tragedy, like the relationship with someone who found something there that captures life. So you mentioned being in other people's photos. And so I used to live on Capitol Hill in DC in Washington.
01:02:33
Speaker
And, um, my commute, I had this really incredible commute now that I think it was like my early twenties and I lived on Capitol Hill. So on my 20 minute journey to work, I would walk across the Supreme court grounds and then the right by the library of Congress. Look at young Emily going across all the major centers of power. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I just, I just.
01:03:02
Speaker
settled it and wrote it to a podcast. All that power.
01:03:06
Speaker
It's all meant to be for you. Yeah, indeed. But I was constantly in tourist photos. It was like, after work, I mean, it was impossible. I mean, I used to think about how many photos that people would have from their DC. Oh my gosh, there's the Supreme Court. And that would be me with my backpack and a curly face coming back from work.
01:03:36
Speaker
But yeah, I'm sure. I had the same experience at Oxford Street at Christmas because I want to meet you, actually. We had a drink with one of your friends. Oh, yeah. I don't remember. I was really, really not feeling well that day. I was super grumpy. And it was Christmas time. So all tourists, everyone from the whole of England is
01:03:58
Speaker
in that street at that time. And beyond, and beyond. I mean, if anybody in other countries feel like, where did everybody go? They're on Oxford Street, okay? That's what everybody is. And so I just remember that I was walking
01:04:12
Speaker
in that crowd and everyone had their phones videoing. They were taking, it's not even a picture anymore, it's a video. And I just said, okay, I'm so grumpy. I think I'm just going to ruin those videos. I just feel like doing something silly, not even like something cool, like just chewing the finger, just something silly, just behaving like a mad person.
01:04:35
Speaker
So, shall we wrap this up? I think we should. And we should talk about what is the image that we would most like to have, right? And I think you should say that again without handling a book and moving away from your microphone.
01:04:56
Speaker
Is that how this works? So I bought this The Light and Shadow book. I went down to the bookshop and I asked them, I was like, do you have anything from that room? They were like, they looked on the shelf. I don't think we have anything. And then he went to the back for like five minutes and he was like, oh, we have one. And it was 65 quid. So I was like,
01:05:19
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. You have very inexpensive tickets, but then your catalogs, man. But it's the kind of amount of money that you think twice about whether or not you want to chuck it across the counter. And I did, and I'm so glad I did. It was your favorite bit of the exhibition.
01:05:35
Speaker
And I've looked at it so much. I mean, I just feel this compulsion to keep taking it off the shelf. I'm not, I don't know what it is about these pictures, but there's something about it that just kind of like, I feel a little bit weepy. Like, I don't know what it is. As for myself, um, I'm, I'm betraying Moriyama because I loved an image, um, a color image.
01:06:05
Speaker
It's not a black and white one. And it's an image of teeth, of the upper side of the teeth. Well, it's probably false teeth, a denture, the half dentures. And it's just the upper bit. And it's taken from below. So an angle you can never have on someone's mouth.
01:06:36
Speaker
And, but at the same time, it's very clinical. It's a very strange image because it's very well lit. It's, it's very white. The light's very white and the gums are super pink. I'm fascinated by mouths, you know, they, they, they're, they, and tongues, they do everything, right?
01:06:58
Speaker
It used to communicate, to eat, to feel pleasure, to give pleasure, to kiss, to, I don't know, it's just fascinating. And I love that image and I think that's the one I would take home. Cool, cool. Yeah, no, there's a lot of deep-seated feelings about teeth. It's like if you have dreams about them falling out, that's like sort of a classic anxiety dream. Cool, that sounds great.
01:07:25
Speaker
I think we have to do our duties, right? And just say, remind our listeners to subscribe, to follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts, to leave us reviews. That's always helpful. So we're just starting this and we're having fun and we want to take it to the next level. So, you know, just give, send us some love back. That would be awesome. You can also follow us on Instagram. Our handle is exhibitionistasunderschoolpodcast.
01:07:55
Speaker
and leave us ideas. Just react to whatever we say. Correct us. We say probably nonsense. And if you have any ideas, suggestions of exhibitions, get in touch. Our email is exhibitionistaspodatgmail.com. Great. That's it. I think that covers it. Yeah, you got down to business. Thank you, Joanna. I got down to business. That's who I am, a businesswoman.
01:08:24
Speaker
I'm looking at your shoulder pads now. They are impressive.