Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama are living legends in the field of postwar Japanese photography. Both came to prominence in the late 1960s — Araki for intimate, at times controversial portraits of his sexual partners, Moriyama for his high-contrast, black-and-white street photographs. Both heavily influenced global trends in photography throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
Their first joint exhibition in nearly two decades, “400 Polaroids,” at Ratio 3, makes up for lost time by presenting Araki’s largest, and Moriyama’s first, selection of instant-film pictures ever shown in the United States.
The visual deluge of the 400 Polaroids is delicately restrained by the show’s curation. I’m a sucker for artworks presented in grids, a trend familiar to many via Instagram, though popularized long before that in the artists’ salons of old Paris, and “400 Polaroids” takes this method to an ecstatic conclusion. The Polaroids, individually housed in thick plastic collector’s cases, are arranged in 10 groupings of four shelves, each shelf housing a row of 10 pictures, each row alternating artists by picture, allowing for a decompressed, if dizzying, viewing experience.
Both photographers take a slice-of-life approach to photography, though the lives they lead prove to be near opposites, a tension that could be summed up in the difference between interiors and exteriors.
Araki is no stranger to Polaroids, a medium that has been integral to his practice for decades, the entries here chronicling a period from 2006 to 2016. Most show nude models, many of whom are tied in ornate Japanese bondage, while others are saturated shots of floral arrangements, reminiscent of the Dutch masters. Selections from two series, “Arakiri” and “Polanography,” feature two Polaroids spliced together, some of two models, others of a model and an inanimate object, creating playful, tantalizing collages with a surrealist bent.
Moriyama’s more tranquil street scenes are the result of a self-contained project titled “bye bye polaroid,” produced over a five-month period 2008 in response to the news that Polaroid film would be discontinued that year. Many of these pictures revel in the image-laden nature of contemporary public space, focusing on advertisements and screens. Others show fellow flaneurs, wandering alone or in couples, and quiet plays of light and shadow through foliage.
It would do a disservice to the show to talk about it in terms of the impact of particular, single images. The exhibition finds its meaning in the cacophony of multitudes and the contrast between the two artists’ styles. What is so interesting here is seeing these two artists in conversation through differing approaches to the most elemental form of photography.
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The magic of instant film is its singularity within a medium perhaps best defined by reproduction. If a photograph has come to be synonymous with an image that can be printed ad nauseum or shared infinitely across digital platforms, is it correct to call a Polaroid a photograph? It’s something closer to a gestural sketch, a reflexive response to encountering beauty with an urgency emphasizing the decisive quality of picture making.
Araki and Moriyama’s differing approaches to instant film imbue both of their series with their own particular strain of urgency. Araki is drawn to the medium for its immediacy, less a matter of posterity than a way of being in the moment itself, whereas Moriyama’s pictures feel like an attempt to slow down and memorialize. Araki lives in the world by photographing, while the world lives in Moriyama’s photographs. Here, we get to live through both.
