Drifting amid memories, images of postwar Japan

In 1971, photographer Daido Moriyama stepped out of a Japanese hotel as a stray dog with matted hair walked past. Moriyama raised his camera, and the dog turned toward him. In its desperate gaze, he saw his own reflection.

“Memories of a Dog,” at the Michael Dawson Gallery until June 5, includes that haunting image and other prints by Moriyama, one of Japan’s most influential photographers. Fittingly for this gallery, which adjoins a bookstore in Larchmont Village, the pictures are from Moriyama’s book of the same title

The book, published by Nazraeli Press, is the first English translation of a series of essays Moriyama wrote for a Japanese photography magazine during the 1980s. The series was, in effect, a 15-month journal of experiences and realizations during a period of introspection as he traveled through Japan.

Moriyama, now 65, came of age in the aftermath of World War II and, like Japan itself, was searching for what lay beyond the darkness of those years.

“I was a small child right after the war and lived in many different places,” he says through a translator. “I saw burned-out cities. Of course, I didn’t have a camera then, so I had to photograph with my eyes.” Moriyama photographs the unvarnished lives of the outcast and the ordinary. His work is provocative, raw -- often blurred and grainy, sometimes mystifying and unsettling like life itself. He photographs through windows and from moving cars, focusing with his heart, not his eyes.

“When I walk now, camera in hand ... I am listening to the memories of dreams spoken by a town that once was,” he wrote in one of the essays in “Memories.” All his work, he explains, addresses themes of the road and towns. Many of the photographs in the book and show are cityscapes: a solitary man walking down an empty street, crowds and signs, ribbons of railroad tracks and power lines, boys with expressions as lifeless as their urban surroundings. Scattered throughout are images of empty roads and endless skies.

“Photography is a tool for recognizing the world and time and myself,” Moriyama says. “A photograph is a fossil of time and light. That’s always been my foundation.”

The 15 essays were published in book form in Japan in 1984 and reissued in paperback in 2001. They marked Moriyama’s first attempt at writing for publication.

“In Japan, just about every book kiosk carries the paperback. It became a classic in Japanese modern literature,” says Chris Pichler, founder of Nazraeli Press. “In Japan, it has ‘Catcher in the Rye’ status among young people.”

The writing and English translation are eloquent. In one essay, Moriyama, nocturnal by nature, describes a late-night scene at a bar. “The sediment of the muddled and troublesome world clings to their slumped shoulders, and the shadow of life is on their faces, greasy from booze.... Scenes of home play in their memories like mirages, and even in the heart of one who has no such home, a vision of the evening sun falling on a broad field of rape flowers surfaces, and the sight of wind coursing through the fields appears.”

Drawn like Matsuo Basho and Jack Kerouac to the road, Moriyama lived a bohemian life as a young man and at times became lost in his own darkness. He once wrote that he lived “in a state of dissatisfied impatience and desolation. The only solution ... was to take photographs constantly and print them with abandon.”

He was part of a group of young Japanese photographers in the 1960s inspired by the possibility of social change. With cameras, they put a mirror to the world.

“In postwar Japan, you have a young generation trying to find itself in the face of this extraordinary defeat,” says Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Tucker wrote “The History of Japanese Photography,” published last year in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name.

“They were totally the opposite of a kind of lyric and exquisitely refined and printed tradition,” Tucker says. “Moriyama and the others arose from unrest, and I think part of the power of their photographs was that in spirit ... they aroused that radical change and social unrest and youth-against-tradition manifestation that was happening in Japan.”

“A coiled tiger” is how she describes Moriyama, his eyes restless, always suspecting that hidden within the next shadow, fog or night are fragments of light scattered like notes of a shattered song, waiting to be found.

Moriyama sees and hears carefully. Photographs are personal memories, he says. When people see his work, it can evoke their own memories just like a song. “The intersection of these two memories can make something that is even stronger.”

Moriyama’s last major project was a book about Shinjuku, an area of Tokyo, published in 2002. This year, he says he hopes to do a project in Hawaii. He says he still identifies with the stray dog of long ago -- hungry, alert, nearly invisible -- a wanderer without destination.

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Memories of a Dog

Photographs by Daido Moriyama

Where: Michael Dawson Gallery, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Monday and Tuesday by appointment

Ends: June 5

Info: (323) 469-2186 or www.michaeldawsongallery.com