Midnight Snackbar, Yokohama
Daidō Moriyama (森山 大道)
Japanese, born 1938
1970
A black-and-white gelatin silver photograph in which Moriyama uses grainy blur and an off-kilter, crowded composition to throw the viewer into the raw, nocturnal atmosphere of a Yokohama snackbar rather than offering a posed scene.
You’re struck by the claustrophobic immediacy—the faces pushed at different planes of focus, some smeared close to the lens, others lost in shadow beside a glowing jukebox—so the image feels like a sudden, voyeuristic snapshot of urban life.
Made amid the Provoke moment, this work exemplifies Moriyama’s ‘are-bure-boke’ (rough, blurry, out-of-focus) approach that overturned documentary conventions and opened street photography to urgent, subjective expressions of postwar modernity.
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
13 × 18 3/16" (33.0 × 46.3 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the artist
Accession
387.1977
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
