Daido Moriyama

While living in Zushi, a commuter town an hour away from Tokyo, Daido Moriyama traveled to and from the capital every day, giving him the opportunity to observe the nameless faces crowding the platforms on their way to work. Shot in a single day, the photographs in the PLATFORM, 1977 series underline the peculiar aspects of mundanity commuters often fail to see. Exhibited on a Vevey train station platform, it gave train pas-sengers the chance to experience the Japanese photographer’s perspective and maybe to invent a new life for themselves during their own daily commute.

Daido Moriyama lived in Paris between 1988 and 1989. During his stay, described in his memoirs, the photographer made a series directly inspired by Eugène Atget’s “Old Paris”. As he was strolling through Les Halles, he noticed a gigantic inflatable whale floating in the air, hanging between two cranes. Struck by the surreal scene, with his camera at the ready, he created an instant record of the giant from the seas barging into the Parisian sky. Presented in monumental format on the facade of a hydro-turbine company, the almost 220-m2 image welcomed visitors arriving at Festival Images by train and introduced the theme of the 2018 edition: Extravaganza. Out of Ordinary.

A living legend in photography and pioneer of street photography, Daido Moriyama has been roaming Tokyo for over 60 years. Known for his sharply contrasting black-and-white shots, he favours spontaneity. In the Pretty Woman series, he combines colour and black and white to reinterpret the capital’s neighbourhoods between 2016 and 2017. To coincide with his retrospective at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, the Biennale Images Vevey and Photo Elysée are presenting a monumental installation of an iconic photograph: a close-up of a mannequin wearing sunglasses, reflecting urban life and a self-portrait of the photographer. In the age of AI-generated images, this photo raises doubts about its nature. Repositioned in Vevey, the photograph becomes a monumental mise en abyme, a tribute to Moriyama’s style and to beauty in the ordinary.