I am fascinated by Daido Moriyama’s representation of ‘concreteness'; particularly in the emerging images in his 1972 collection ‘Farewell Photography’. Which parts are erased, and which parts take on new life? Temporality is marked by the practice itself, or the viewing, rather than the context.

The moment when the photograph is inside of the developer and under the red light bulb, when the image oozes through and rises to the surface, this is when I most strongly perceive a sense of my own concreteness. Therefore, to me, although the shooting at the actual place is a concrete process, and not just a work of reproduction … it was rather in the dark room, when using hand techniques and when looking at the image as it slowly rose to the surface, that I responded to the concrete impact that “the world never seen before” had on me. It is in the dark room that I can unexpectedly encounter ” a self never seen before”.

Daido Moriyama, Shashin to no taiwa (A Dialogue with Photography), Seikosha, 1995, p.122