Gritty Photos of Japan’s Red-Light and Commercial District

By Flavorwire Staff

April 12, 2012

Burning car crashes, male geishas, stray dogs like wolves, girls running through rubble — since the 1960s, noted photographer Daidō Moriyama has been shooting gritty, high contrast, black-and-white images in Japan’s Shinjuku district iconic. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s newspaper silkscreens and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima, Moriyama’s winding urban wanderings show snippets of cultural conflict in post-war Japan — Westernization, consumerism, ’80s fashion. See Shinjuku — home of the world’s busiest train station, a red-light district, and major government and commerce centers — filtered through Moriyama’s radical aesthetic of are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) at Fracture: Daido Moriyama , on view now through July 31st at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wander the labyrinth in our slideshow of favorites and see who’s around the corner.