Photography Exhibition: At the Philadelphia Museum of Art - Daidō Moriyama: Tokyo Photographs

Currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art there is a wonderful exhibition, Daidō Moriyama: Tokyo Photographs.

The exhibition will run until August 23, 2009

I agree with the Museum that Daidō Moriyama is one of the most important and exciting Japanese photographers of our time, having made prolific, often experimental pictures of modern urban life since the 1960s. This exhibition showcases a group of approximately 45 photographs made in and around Tokyo in the 1980s, when Moriyama focused his mature aesthetic on the city with renewed intensity.

Moriyama approaches the world with an equalizing eye, capturing disparate peripheral details that in themselves account for little, but together add up to a powerful diagnosis of modern experience. In 1980s Japan such details encompassed the disorienting and sometimes brutal juxtaposition of traditional culture and modernization, most visible in the glut of consumer goods and images. But in Moriyama’s photographs these subjects appear alongside the banal elements of any streetscape: a derelict patch of pavement and wall, a car with an aggressive key scratch running its full length, even a single rose blossom.

If you're traveling in the Philadelphia, PA area, don't miss this wonderful exhibition.

This article is the first of a new feature of the NSL Photography Blog, to bring to your attention important, interesting and worthwhile photography exhibitions by famous, not so famous, and unknown photographers. As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.