Dates: Jul 25 – Aug 26, 2006

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our forthcoming solo exhibition with Daido Moriyama. The exhibition will premiere “shinjuku 1973, 25pm,” a film work shot by Daido Moriyama in 1973.

In 17 minutes, not a second goes by in which the camera focus on the scene,there is nothing but blurs flows, rough images. Light splits off and fades away, hangs down and is caught in the tepid night,

a world of bored darkness. Atmosphere at midnight in Shinjuku, 35 years ago. The sound is an engine of the machine of Nanahan and the horn of a taxi. I, who shot it, return to a limitless nostalgia for the Shinjuku at 25:00 pm of those days. An 8mm video version of “Farewell Photography.”

Daido Moriyama, 2006

This film was originally shot in 1973 with an 8mm portable VTR, by the request of Shinjuku Ward for promotion of the city. However, the completed film was rejected by Shinjuku Ward because it was a sequence of unidentified images in which one cannot identify the country in which it was shot. Thus the film was shelved for over 30 years.

The “Blurs / flows / rough images,” which are characteristic of Moriyama’s photography, obviously appear in this film. The screen sways as if in the wind, the night town a trace of light that comes and goes, the camera tracing a monochrome world which is situated somewhere between the border of figuration and abstraction.

On the occasion of screening the film, we will exhibit new photographic stills which Moriyama shot from the rediscovered film. The repetition inherent in this project serves as further evidence of Moriyama’s continuing concern with the act of copying.

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