Daido Moriyama, Flaming Glory

Photographed in black-and-white, and often unclear, damaged, or constructed through the variations in the intensity of the grain where the film is visible, the 1972 work Farewell Photography is considered to be a key moment in the career of Daido Moriyama. In 2019, a new edition of the publication was released by Getsuyosha / bookshop M.

The photographer, and former assistant to Eikoh Hosoe, before joining the Provoke movement and publishing a magazine with his friend and critic Takumi Nakahira, was 34 years old when the first edition of the publication was released. He wished to say farewell to a form of photography that was too self-satisfied to question its own meaning. It was a radical gesture, emerging from a long period of reflection, that lead Moriyama to burn the negatives from Farewell Photography, save for just 30 or so. Fifty or so more were later found with his publisher. The first edition has since been integrated into the work The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (2001) by Andrew Roth.

A sombre work, breaking with the codes of the era

Speaking to Mark Hudson, journalist for The Telegraph, Daido Moriyama announced that ‘the book was incomprehensible to everyone, which was what I intended.’ Here, the dark face of Tokyo in the 1960s and 70s and its sociopolitical context is presented through blurry, grainy, imbalanced images – a far cry from the standards of the internationally celebrated American photography of the time. The project was a turning point in the career of Daido Moriyama, who soon after became a more conventional artist. ‘I started photographing things that are in the DNA of Japan: cherry blossoms, and the most beautiful views of Japan as you’d see them in postcards – only I made these images really dark.’

After an initial re-edition in 2007, which was met with great success, the new version includes a conversation between Daido Moriyama and Takumi Nakahira, translated into English for the first time, plunging the reader into a key moment in the history of photography and the Japanese cultural scene. According to the editor, this new edition is not just a republication of a classic, but a reinterpretation. 

Farewell to Photography (2019), by Daido Moriyama is published by Getsuyosha / bookshop M.