LAST LEGEND - DAIDO MORIYAMA

The inconsistencies and broken promises of Hawaii are fascinating. A godlike postcard of beauty made mortal by greed, war, drugs and development, Hawaii illustrates the human condition at its most destructive. For every perfect beach and unforgotten native tradition, there’s a shady real estate deal gone wrong, a tourist-trap hotel claiming an unspoiled landscape’s chastity, and a heartbreaking meth addict living in squalor—all of which brings a dose of the all-too-human to a landscape beyond imagination. In a new body of work, titled “Hawaii,” iconic Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama trains his lens on the most unknowable state, bringing his own uniquely aestheticized honesty to each image. A master of image-making that exposes as much as it exalts, Moriyama has spent the last half-century creating photographs with a vague, persistent sense of unrest percolating beneath a surface of inky black outlines. The photographer’s super high-contrast black-and-white images—the dark, devilish twins to Man Ray’s angelically haloed, solarised works—appear almost as drawings, abstractions that somehow remain devoted to knowable content. An image of a woman’s crotch in fishnet tights is, in Moriyama’s gaze, never simply an arresting, sexy picture. It is a study of form akin to Minimalist sculpture, and it’s also, like many of Moiyama’s works, an analysis and depiction of desire that doesn’t hide behind insincerity or white glove gentility. Which is why, as an emblem of paradise almost-lost, Hawaii is infinitely plausible as the master’s new muse. Moriyama reportedly visited the islands five times before feeling prepared to undertake this body of work (which took him three years to produce), and this scholarship and interest in true understanding is felt in the images. Like black cats prowling between hibiscus and birds of paradise, Moriyama’s images underscore the fact that, unlike the utopia we dream about and think we know, the true Hawaii isn’t bathed in innocent, golden light.

Hawaii opens at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York on February 13

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