In accepting The ICP 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award, Daido Moriyama said, through a translator, My life in photography has been one long road over a hill. These humble words reverberate like a stone dropped into still water, a thought shared, perhaps, by all who have taken art-making as their life’s work.

Moriyama’s photography work, which he began making in post World War II Japan, offers a harsh, crude view of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters. Primarily shot in black and white, and often reproduced as photocopies during the early years, his work occupies a unique space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real. Moriyama's use of a small hand-held automatic camera gives his images a deceptively loose and casual aesthetic, which is undermined by a forceful and decisive point of view.

Photography in Japan is mainly distributed through photo books, and the list of titles published by Moriyama since 1968 runs to several pages. At post time today, most of those items now reside at the ICP Library, with the Moriyama Pop-Up Library Window Exhibit continuing through May 23. ICP Library at the International Center of Photography School, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, NY, NY. Open to the public by appointment. Information. See my DART post about Moriayama’s Printing Show-TKY event at Aperture last fall (above), which was organized by Ivan Vartanian of Goliga. Photo: Peggy Roalf.

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