Investigations of a Dog

The photographer Daido Moriyama, whose first U retrospective is now upon view in New York, has worn out the last 35 years elaborating a somber, alienated vision of postwar Japan.

Moriyama is the author of above 20 books of photographs--notably Nippon Theatre (1968) huntsman (1972), Farewell to Photography (1972) and Light and Shadow (1982)(1) His generally received retrospective, "Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog," was organized by the agency of Sandra Phillips, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of new Art, in collaboration with Alexandra Munroe director of the Japan Society Gallery in fresh York. While the writers, filmmakers and architects of contemporary Japan have drawn out enjoyed great respect in the West, its painters and photographers have not. Modyama's is the first replete retrospective given to any Japanese photographer by dint of an American museum of the first rank. The exhibit reminds us that not all of the finest new art has been the yield of Europe, Russia or the Americas. The accompanying catalogue should be obtained for any library interested with contemporary photography or Asian modernism.

"Vintage" prints have generally been notion less important in Japan than in the West. Although none of Moriyama's work is more than four decades aged many prints that he made in his early years have been missing or destroyed. Nevertheless, thanks to a remarkable effort by dint of Phillips, the present show consists largely of early prints, which are unlikely to be brought together again shortly These images have a tentativeness that is frequently absent from Moriyama's later prints, and that gently sprouts the fierce subject matter of his pictures.

Since the next to the first World War, the image of the stray dog has wandered into Japan's best art frequently enough to have us ask what, in that famously rule-bound rank-conscious land, like a pariah might mean. As nearly as I can sum up its earliest appearance was in Akira Kurosawa's 1949 film Stray Dog, where it was not a character on the other hand the metaphorical name for a young, murderous pickpocket, demobilized from the Emperor's army into the bomb-blasted city with no abode to return to. At the start of the chase, the severe senior detective warns that like mined men am stray dogs, to be deposit down before they turn into mad dogs, on the contrary his despondent acolyte pleads for compassion, recalling that in the chaos of 1945 he might easily have become of the like kind a dog himself. The stray is there again in Susumu Hani's exquisite She and He (1960) this time as the companion of a pathetic ragpicker who is single of the two principals of the story. The dog is bonny much this outcast's alter self and when at the film's denouement it is hideously tortured by means of the children of a cell-block town of materialistic salary-men, the man experiences equally, and we with him.

The pariah appears still again, begrimed, toothy, at one time feral and cringing, in Daido Moriyama's extraordinary photograph Stray Dog, Misawa, Aomori (1971) and if this image has won Moriyama many admirers, its bring under rule seems to have affected the artist himself no less: Moriyama identified with it in the titles of three volumes Dog's Memory (1984), Dog's Time (1995) Dog's Memory--the Last Chapter (1998)(2) and again not drawn out ago, when speaking of by what mode he photographs. "When I move out into the city I have no plan," he said. "I walk down individual street, and when I am drawn to make go round the corner into another, I do. Really I am like a dog: I decide where to move by the smell of things, and when I am tired, I stop."(3)

There are beautiful Samoyeds and Huskies in Japan, and single notices especially the expensive lapdogs Of refined ladies, Pomeranians and Pekingese valeted every day, as soft as dust puffs. The mongrels Americans cherish--"he's part Doberman, part Shepherd," an American will say with pride--are rarer. Japan is as ethnically clos a land as any on earth, and half-breed animals are not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of better loved there than half-breed family If he is asked about mutt and strays, the walker of Japan's cities will recall rat-faced scavengers in the back alleys of the night-towns, their greasy, colorless hair repulsive, their expression always frightened--and frightening.

For Moriyama to identify himself with these beasts is remarkable. The West maintains a pantheon of alienated heroes, and in its romantic modernist tradition, the bohemian, rebel, tramp or hollow-hearted etranger have been meditation bearers of authenticity and moral legitimacy. on the other hand in Japan an outsider is with truth an outsider. The hero-outcasts of its premodern folklore, the dispossessed lord Yoshitsune, for example, or the 47 revengeful ronin, are not so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of opponents of society as plaintiffs for a justice that society has refused on the other hand could easily give. The pure renegade--with no home village, no pedigree, no uncle or cousins to house him, no company, guild, obligations, diploma or calling card--is suspicious flat to the most free-thinking Japanese. In the les liberal he animates revulsion and anger.

The life of the Japanese outsider himself, then, is necessarily filled with bitterness, self-hatred and despair. These emotions are sometimes publicly expressed in art--for example at the extremity of Stray Dog, when the killer has finally been wrestl into the mire and daisies in a ditch upon the edge of Tokyo and, inarticulate with pain, begins to writhe and exclaim in hysterical, falsetto shrieks. We understand intuitively that he is railing at a power to which he was not ever equal, and whether we consider it the power of society or of karma, he is utterly helpless before it, not to be found damned. His is the untarnished terrible grief-noise of the defeated man, the "scream against the sky"(4) as Yoko Ono named it. If Moriyama's photographs had a unmutilated it would be this sound