shashasha

Daido Moriyama continues his photo diary-like “Record” series. Originally started in 1972 and revived in 2006, Moriyama publishes several of these zine-like photobooks each year. For issue 56, Moriyama photographed mainly in Yokosuka, the city where his career once began and where he now lives at the age of 85. His black-and-white photographs extract out singular moments, capture the materiality of surfaces and textures, and rearrange reality into new contexts.

“It is the atmosphere in the streets, the people that I meet here now, the way everything smells, that is so different now. I know that it’s useless to expect everything to be just as I remember it from roaming the streets that I identified with Yokosuka some 60 years ago. Nonetheless, I ask myself where in the world those unique nightly sceneries, those ladies swaggering through the dusky streets with the American soldiers, have all gone. As a matter of course, things change with the times, with age and through the generations, and this place makes no exception. But at the same time, there are those things that do remind me of the Yokosuka that I know so well: the area around the station on the Yokosuka Line, the sea you could see from Shiori station, the ships and cranes on the military base…”
― from Daido Moriyama’s afterword (included in Japanese & English)