For 60 years, 85-year-old photographer Daido Moriyama has been influencing photographers around the world with his prolific output of gritty, urban imagery and commitment to sharing his work via self-publishing.
“Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective,” currently exhibiting in Helsinki at The Finnish Museum of Photography’s K1 gallery in the Kamp Galleria shopping center, attempts to encapsulate all six decades with 200 works, two video installations and some of the photographer’s rare photobooks and magazines. In doing so, it succeeds in creating a cohesive but somewhat crowded overview of Moriyama’s career for his first-ever retrospective in Finland.
“What we wanted to do in this small space is have as many images available as we could,” explains K1’s curator, Paivio Maurice Omwami, adding that he and his team worked with Brazilian curator Thyago Nogueira of Instituto Moreira Salles to adapt the sprawling retrospective for the gallery’s limited subterranean space in downtown Helsinki after the show’s four-month run at The Photographer’s Gallery in London. “The pace is quite intense at moments, but it allows the audience to say, ‘OK, I’ll pop back in another time to sit with all this work again.’”