Above: From Another Country in New York. © Daido Moriyama, courtesy Galerie Alex Daniels/Reflex Amsterdam.

2012 can be called the “Year of Daido Moriyama,” starting with the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement, in May. Even before that, the energy began to gather with the presentation by Ivan Vartanian from Goliga Books of Printing Show—TKY at Aperture Gallery on the weekend of November 4, 2011. During four intense sessions, participants were invited to select and edit 20 double-sided gatefold spreads from a group of 52 displayed on the gallery walls. The pages were printed on demand on Aperture’s brand-new color copier. The final books, each a unique volume, were bound into silk-screened covers, also printed on-site, with a colophon signed by Moriyama, who was present for the duration of this publishing performance.

New York: During the month of May, ICP hosted a “Moriyama Pop-Up Library,” in conjunction with the Infinity Award. Several generous donors, with the assistance of ICP curator Christopher Phillips, Ivan Vartanian and Akio Nagasawa from the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, made it possible for the ICP Library to assemble the most comprehensive collection of Daido Moriyama photobooks outside of Japan. The 42 titles have since been re-shelved, but are available to students and researchers by appointment. Librarian Matthew Carson has put together a thorough Moriyama bibliography. ICP Library, 1114 Avenue of The Americas, NY, NY.

Los Angeles: Meanwhile, the LA County Art Museum has mounted an intimate show of 50 prints from its collection, which will close at the end of July. From the catalogue: Daido Moriyama’s muse is Shinjuku, a power center of Tokyo pulsing with wealth and its dangerous effects. In Moriyama's world, businessmen, lonely housewives, prostitutes and mobsters roam the streets, proving interesting and suspicious characters for his seedy stills. Yet his photographs do not tell stories but rather present a singular moment from an odd and particular vantage point. His personal yet mysterious style is described as "are, bure, boke" (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus.)

The high contrast mementos resemble bits of evidence surrounding some great urban mystery that Moriyama doesn't care to solve. Instead we get a jumble of eroticized tunnels, shadows and strangers that, if not understandable are undeniably beautiful. A selection of his photo books highlights the artist’s experiments with reproduction media and the transformative possibilities of the printed page. Moriyama’s achievements convey the artist’s boldly intuitive exploration of urban mystery, memory, and photographic invention. Information. 

Fracture: Daido Moriyama closes July 31^st. LA County Art Museum, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. Slideshow

Daido Moriyama, from ‘71-NY (Andrew Roth/PPP Editions 2002). Out of print.

Amsterdam: Closing on July 28th is Daido Moriyama: Journey for Something at Galerie Alex Daniels-Reflex. From the website: Moriyama’s extensive oeuvre has been for the most part a love letter to Shinjuku, the bustling area of Tokyo where businessmen, tourists, prostitutes and hipsters jostle the brightly lit streets. Shinjuku is also home to the city’s vices – the entertainment district Kabukicho, notorious for its gangster activity, brothels and strip clubs. Many of his photographs evoke a scene in which something has just happened, or just about to. The people in his images are either turned away from the camera, their identity obscured, or else challenge the lens with a confrontational stare.

Born in Osaka in 1938, Moriyama witnessed the dramatic period of change that occurred in Japan in the decades following the second world war. Much of his work reflects that tension between tradition and modernity. In the 1960s and 1970s Moriyama’s highly textured, dramatically contrasted images took the Japanese photography scene by storm. He was influenced by Japanese photographers Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, but also by William Klein, Andy Warhol, and Robert Frank.

Daido Moriyama: Journey for Something, closing July 28th at Galerie Alex Daniels-Reflex Amsterdam, Weteringschans 79 A1017 RX. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery has produced a 250-page catalogue, featuring a mix of new and iconic images, with essays by Matthias Harder, Helmut Newton Foundation Berlin and Eric Kessels, Information.

Above: Untitled, 2002 (detail), from Fracture: Daido Moriyama, at LA County Art Museum. © Daido Moriyama, courtesy Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhaueser. information.

London: On September 7, Michael Hoppen Gallery opens Tights and Lips, which continues through October 20^th. 3 Jubilee Place, Chelsea, SW3 3TD.

London: In October, the Tate Modern opens an exhibition explores the relationship between the work of William Klein (born 1928), one of the 20th century’s most important and influential photographers and filmmakers, and that of Daido Moriyama. Taking as its central themes the cities of New York and Tokyo, it traces the influence of Klein’s landmark 1956 photo-book, Life is Good & Good for you in New York: Trance Witness Revels, on Japanese photography, using Moriyama as a focus. It brings together for the first time vintage photographs from Klein’s New York work, as well as those taken in Tokyo and Paris, with work made by Moriyama in the same cities.

The exhibition includes landmark projects from the 1970s such as Moriyama’s Another Country in New York, and Farewell Photography. In addition to exploring the central role of the photo-book in the history of avant-garde art, this exhibition examines the use of film and photography in the representation of urban experience and political protest. Opening reception: Monday, October 8, 2012. Information. Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG.

London: Ivan Vartanian will be re-staging Printing Show—TKY inside the Tate Modern on October 14^th. Details are not yet available but Ivan has told me that the ticket price will be moderate to encourage public participation. You may contact him by email for information. For an in-depth discussion of Moriyama's process related specifically to Printing Show—TKY, read the interview with Ivan on the ICP Library blog.

New York: A new book from Moriyama, Labyrinth: Daido Moriyama, will be released by Aperture in October. This just in: Throughout Daido Moriyama’s career, he has continually sought new ways of presenting and recontextualizing his work, frequently recasting his images through the use of different printing techniques, installation, or re-editing and re-formatting. In each iteration, images both old and new take on changed and newly charged significance….The [book includes] reproductions of original contact sheets; sequences of new contact sheets made from recombined negative strips, which juxtapose images from the 1950s with those from the past ten years; and selections of individual images, both familiar and newly discovered. Together, these offer a compact and comprehensive assembly of the artist’s oeuvre, tracing recurring motifs and proposing startling new interpretations of some of his most iconic images.

Daido Moriyama (born in Osaka, 1938) has been publishing and exhibiting his photography since the late 1960s, with a bibliography of over three hundred monographs to his name. A majorretospective, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, originated in 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and subsequently  toured internationally to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Japan Society in New York, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and numerous other venues. He is a recipient of the Cultural Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Photographie, and the 2012 International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. Exhibitions include On the Road, a retrospective survey presented at the Osaka National Museum of Art from June to October 2011 and Fracture: Daido Moriyama at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from April to July 2012. View the official website.