Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) is one of the most influential Japanese photographers of the postwar period. His radically subjective images of streets, people, signs and fragments of urban life transformed the possibilities of the photographic medium. High contrast, heavy grain, blur and oblique framing—the qualities described in Japanese criticism as are, bure, boke, or grainy, blurry and out of focus—are not failures in his work but deliberate means of conveying the instability and immediacy of experience. He often photographs without raising the camera to his eye, and for more than six decades has continually questioned what photography can be.

Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Moriyama trained in graphic design and bought his first camera, an inexpensive Canon, at the age of twenty. He worked in Osaka under the photographer Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961, where he joined the Vivo collective and became an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. The work of William Klein and Shōmei Tōmatsu made a profound impression on him, as did the social and political unrest of the period. In 1964, he began working independently, receiving the New Artist Award of the Japan Photo Critics Association in 1967.

An admirer of Jack Kerouac, Moriyama hitchhiked along Japan’s new highways at all hours, stopping at deserted cafés and photographing through car windows. The resulting images were published serially in Camera Mainichi beginning in 1968. That same year, Japan: A Photo Theater transformed itinerant performers and the theatricality of everyday Japanese life into a heightened visual spectacle. His close friend Takuma Nakahira brought him into Provoke for its second issue in 1969. Within the highly political context of the group, Moriyama maintained an essentially apolitical position, while Farewell Photography (1972) pushed the photographic image toward its own destruction, incorporating film edges, dust and sprocket holes into the printed picture.

A visit to New York in 1969, where Moriyama encountered Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, gave him an idea that would become fundamental to his practice: duplication, repetition and mass production are intrinsic to photography rather than a betrayal of the medium. He began photographing photographs and reframing existing images, as in Accident (1969), made silkscreens of his own photographs, and returned repeatedly to the same motifs, including tights and lips. He rejects the veneration of the unique vintage print in favor of photography’s inherent reproducibility, continually reworking his images through different enlargements, crops and printings.

Much of Moriyama’s work has been conceived for the printed page rather than the gallery wall, and his bibliography now encompasses some 150 publications, among them Light and Shadow, Shinjuku, Tights and the long-running series Record. The city remains his enduring subject, above all Tokyo and Shinjuku, although his practice has taken him across New York, Paris, Buenos Aires and São Paulo. He works as readily in color and digitally as he does in black and white. His photographs were included in New Japanese Photography at The Museum of Modern Art in 1974, and a major retrospective organized with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation has travelled from São Paulo to Berlin, London, Helsinki, Lausanne and Vienna.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery announced its representation of Moriyama with the solo exhibition Within the Shadows and subsequently included his work in REWIND (2021).