Throughout Daido Moriyama’s extensive career, he has continually sought new ways of presenting and recontextualizing his work, frequently recasting his images through the use of different printing techniques, installation, or re-editing and reformatting. In each iteration, images both old and new take on changed and newly charged significance. This volume, created during preparations for several international survey exhibitions, offers both the photographer and the viewer the opportunity to consider the photographer’s life work in a fresh light. The author has returned to his contact sheets from the past five decades, selecting previously known images as well as ones never before published. The pages offer reproductions of original contact sheets; sequences of new contact sheets made from recombined negative strips, which juxtapose images from the 1950s with those from the past ten years; and selections of individual images, both familiar and newly discovered. Together, these offer a compact and comprehensive assembly of the artist’s oeuvre, tracing recurring motifs and proposing startling new interpretations of some of his most iconic images. Moriyama has always sought meaning in the raw accumulation and gestalt of sequences of images. Labyrinth: Daido Moriyama makes public an exercise in reconsideration that the photographer has assigned to himself. In opening up this private process of re-examination to a wider public, Moriyama continues to challenge the viewer and his own practice, as well as the larger mechanisms by which photography functions and creates meaning.
