In the past weeks I have have been watching documentaries about the photographer Daido Moriyama. He is one of the formerly wild and provocative Japanese photographers who created the “Provoke” movement in the 1960s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daidō_Moriyama)
As you know I love playing with motion blur and strong contrasts in black and white images. And I love the Provoke app on my iPhone for its raw and gritty black and white rendering. So it makes sense to take my little (and recently underused) Ricoh GRIII camera, set it to black and white contrasty JPEG wit an exposure time of 1/15 second and to go out and try what happens.
Ands what happened was a liberating experience of not needing to focus on composition or technically “correct” or perfect pictures. I shot what caught my eye, created pictures only with my gut feeling and some kind of visceral sense of the situation.
Visceral and intuitive shooting
Moriyama emphasises that you need to go out and shoot a lot in order to create quality work. And yes, I can confirm that. On my first evening I shot 140 pictures and out of those I will probably use between 3 and 5.
But this is not about numbers anyway. it is about following the atmosphere of the street, the way poeple move, the compositions that accidentally fall into place. It is about collecting what life presents to us in all its variety in every moment of our lives. The liberation of this is the fact that things just happen, and we become a part of the events and every moments that occur around us, and we record them (Moriyama said “copy them”) by taking pictures.
Intuition. Raw energy. Expression. Coincidence. Happenstance. Fleeting moments caught in photographs.
I need to admit that my current location, Mackay in Queensland is not the most conducive place for this type of photography. You would probably associate it with the restless and energetic big city life as Moriyama found it in Tokyo. But it is not impossible, it still works, even in a more rural or small town environment.
I am surprised that I did not start putting these components together sooner. Long exposure, contrasty black and white images, intuitive shooting - all these things I loved for a long time. But sometimes things just take time and we can only act on what is due.