Daido Moriyama’s Tribute to Takuma Nakahira

‘On September 7th I attended the memorial service for Takuma Nakahira that was held at 10:30 at a funeral hall in Hiyoshi. I knew Nakahira for over 50 years […] Now that he is gone, I do miss him a lot.’ It is on this mournful note that RECORD No.29 by Daido Moriyama begins. 

The book compiles a series of photographs taken by the Japanese photographer in September 2015, in the hours prior to his friend’s funeral ceremony. It presents a succession of black-and-white images with a highly distinctive style: they are grainy, high-contrast photographs, now referred to as ‘are, bure, boke‘, which can be translated as ‘rough, blurred, and out of focus.’

‘Connected by photography’

Daido Moriyama, who began his career as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe and Takeji Iwamiya before launching the avant-garde magazine Provoke with Takuma Nakahira, plays with frames and reflections. As he wanders through the Hiyoshi district in Yokohama, he captures the scenes that unfold before him, like a final ode to the life of his colleague and friend before commemorating his death. 

‘We were connected both by photography and by the fact that we both lived in Zushi’, Daido Moriyama states. RECORD No.29 testifies to this relationship but also marks the photographer’s return to city scenes and raw portraits after he abandoned these from the 1970s onwards with the publication of his series Farewell Photography, in favour of an almost essentialised photographic representation of Japan. 

RECORD No.29 (2015), a book of photographs by Daido Moriyama, is published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing.