Chambre professionnelle belge de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne (CLAM)

Galerie Ingert (CLAM-BBA) is proud to announce its next opening:

Daido Moriyama, Lettre à St Loup | Solo Show

May 6 — June 12, 2026
46 rue Madame, 75006 Paris

Opening reception: May 5, 2026, 7–9 p.m.

Lettre à St Loup: rarely has a series title so strongly invited reflection on its author’s intentions. More precisely, the pairing of this title with images of Tokyo appears as an interpretive challenge posed to the viewer. 

On a sunny day in 1827, probably in spring or summer, Nicéphore Niépce placed a camera obscura in the recess of the window of his workshop. The latter was located under the eaves of his property at Le Gras in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. For several years, he had been studying and testing the action of light on various substances, from silver salts to hydrocarbons. That day, he chose to place, vertically at the back of his dark chamber, a sheet of polished pewter coated with bitumen of Judea, facing a rustic landscape: the roofs of outbuildings, a dovecote, and, in the background, the barely visible meadows of the Chalonnais. This is all that can just be made out in the oldest surviving photograph today. Nicéphore Niépce called these experiments, produced using the camera obscura, “Points de vue.” Point de vue du Gras  thus constitutes the original specimen of a discipline - photography - that would go on to produce billions more.

In the postface to Lettre à St Loup, published in 1990, Daido Moriyama affirms the decisive importance of this first image in his development as a photographer. By that time, he was no longer merely a member of the Provoke group pushing the medium to its limits - its capacity to bear witness both to reality and to the inner life of the one who presses the shutter. The questioning of the narrative modes ordinarily associated with photography - pursued in particular in Farewell Photography (1972) - and the are-bure-boke aesthetic (grainy, blurred, raw) had by then become integral to a style that functions as a manifesto.

The images that make up the series can be read as elements of an imaginary correspondence whose origin would be the View from the Window at Le Gras. Thus, for the author, everything that follows - whether in photography in general or in his own practice - is the consequence of Nicéphore Niépce’s successful experiment: “It seems to me again that the scene at St. Loup, which was recorded and fossilized, is the original scene for my photography before it was the origin of photography itself.” The attraction that heliography  exerts on him undoubtedly stems, at least in part, from its rugged appearance in dark masses and the partial legibility that results from it.

If the work of the Japanese photographer bears witness to the crisis of the medium in the second half of the twentieth century - through the questioning of its objectivity and the fragmentation of its forms - his avowed return to this primitive reference underscores its continuity. This image concentrates some of the fundamental questions that animate both the discipline and the artist’s trajectory: those of the intelligibility of photography and its relationship to reality.

More than that, this first photograph functions here as a powerful creative force. The effort required to understand what it depicts is undoubtedly not unrelated to this. Daido Moriyama describes with precision this transition from the perception of a nebulous plate to the clear representation of a scene whose dazzling clarity he imagines. He sees it, feels it, and asserts that his entire body of work has had no other aim than to rediscover that light and that moment in time.