Photography As A Flâneur
I seem to be coming full circle on my output – I seem to be returning to experimental music and experimental photography. These two mediums were the bread and butter of around six years ago, when I would live for a Dérive. I would also experiment with my film cameras and take bad photos. But, it was fun. However, in this blog post I would like to talk about this phenomena – the dérive and the camera; the Flâneur and photography.
The artist who got me back in to mode of thinking is Daido Moriyama. Moriyama has taken thens of thousands of photographs and published hundreds of photo essays and photobooks.
The curator Simon Baker reckons ‘… his complete works run to over 2000 pages in four volumes and include Black & White, Colour and Polaroid Photography, Screen Prints, Installations and films.
Moriyama is best known for his monochrome photographs who’s distinct aesthetic earned the label “blurry, grainy and out of focus.” Yet, his colour images reveal the same manifestos and aesthetic quality.
Moriyama’s best known book, Farewell Photography (1972) reads as a catalogue of photography errors – thee are mis-prints, damaged images and so-called ‘bad’ composition, oddly cropped images taken without looking through the viewfinder – it is a statement.
More than half are so ‘blurry, grainy & out of focus’ that it is difficult to see what the depict.
If anything, Moriyama is one of the more celebrated photographers to emerge from the Japanese Provoke Movement. Named after the magazine fo the same name, Provoke was a magazine founded in 1968 by Koji Taki & Takuma Nakahira with the intention to free photography from the shackle of words. Much like I am doing with my website www.korung.org and, hopefully, here.
For the time being, the crap photography I take will be housed on kornung.org – it is shaping up in to quite a site, but needs severely editing.
Have a look at it HERE.
I have the tools, I just need the time and the inclination. It will be a worthwhile project, when it gets off the ground.
