While Japan, after more than two years of closure, is preparing for a timid and gradual reopening of its borders for a limited number of tourists starting from June, whoever is in Rome, or has the opportunity to pass by, can console himself by going to visit a shows that, thanks to both the material on display and the set-up, it offers the illusion of getting lost in the alleys of Tokyo.
Daidō Moriyama and Shōmei Tōmatsu, two masters of post-war Japanese photography, over the decades have portrayed the city, sometimes obsessively, without ever offering panoramic shots but narrowing their gaze on the apparently insignificant details of life in which Tokyo is the background and together it is the protagonist. The curators of Tokyo revisitedat the Maxxi until October 16, they have collected hundreds of those pieces to build a portrait of the capital to be crossed as an experiential journey, accompanied by the sounds of the metropolis and sets that reproduce views of the city in full scale.
Moriyama, the only one of the two still alive (Tōmatsu died in 2012), began wandering Tokyo’s streets and alleys with a compact camera nearly fifty years ago, and has never stopped. Today, at the age of 84, he still snaps wandering around like a stray dog (the definition is his) trying to grasp the soul of the city in the details he comes across by chance: in the uncertain steps of the girls poised on exaggerated wedges, in the looks elusive passengers waiting for the metro on the platform, in the squinting eyes of a passerby who notices the lens. Around, Tokyo.
Different looks
Few cities are as recognizable from a single background fragment as Tokyo. There is almost always a sign, a writing, a detail of a building or asphalt that is immediately familiar to those who know it. And Moriyama, born in Osaka but arrived in the capital in the early 1960s, is obsessed with it by his own admission. For one area in particular, the photographer continues to feel attraction and repulsion: Shinjuku, the district symbol of decadence.
It is in this section of the exhibition that the difference in the gaze of the two photographers really emerges. Tōmatsu, particularly attentive to social issues (think of the series on the survivors of Nagasaki or the one on the cumbersome presence of US bases in the archipelago), portrays Shinjuku in the late 1960s as the scene of clashes between the police and the anti-support movement. of Japan to the US war in Vietnam; Moriyama, born as an urban photographer and always faithful to his origins, enhances his shabby but terribly attractive character. Different but complementary, as teacher and pupil. “For me, as a photographer”, wrote Moriyama a few years ago, “it all started with Shōmei Tōmatsu”.