“Black and white tells the story of my inner world: the deepest feelings and emotions I feel every day as I walk through the streets of Tokyo or other cities, like a vagabond wandering aimlessly. Color describes what I encounter with no filters, and I like to record that as my eyes see it. The former is full of contrasts; it’s pungent and totally reflects my loner personality. The latter is polite and thoughtful of others, which is the way I present myself to the world.”
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka).
Moriyama finished the design course at Osaka Municipal High School of Industrial Arts in 1958 and became a freelance designer. He left that career to study with Takeji Iwamiya (1960) and Eikoh Hosoe (1961-63). In 1963, he became a freelance photographer.
Moriyama met William Klein and Andy Warhol early in his career. He liked their new ideas and made them his own. Moriyama was intrigued by the energy and modernity in Klein’s pictures of New York and the idea of a voyeuristic media culture in Warhol’s work.
Daido Moriyama is known for his black-and-white street photography. Moriyama’s work reflects the political tensions of the time, especially the protests against the renewal of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty in 1970 as well as the subsequent decline in political antagonism between the two countries and the rise in consumerism. For Moriyama, this was the beginning of both a highly productive period and, by the mid-1970s, a time of personal instability. In 1972, he published two books – Hunter and Farewell Photography – and launched the small photographic magazine Record. Hunter contains some of Moriyama’s best-known pictures in stark contrast. Farewell Photography is an experimental production that continued his interest in Warhol-inspired printing. Many of the pictures are blurred and highly cropped, and their subjects are often almost unrecognizable. It’s a sad, empty feeling. The book’s introduction is a conversation with his friend Nakahira, who would soon suffer a severe case of alcohol poisoning.
Moriyama took years to evolve out of this intensity. He began to visit the Japanese countryside, where he produced The Tales of Tono (1974, published 1976), a strange and disorienting series of pictures that reach into preindustrial rural Japan but are not escapist That year, his work was included in New Japanese Photography, an exhibition organized by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It traveled to SFMOMA the following year. This success came at the same time as photography was recognized as an art form in Japan.
Most of Moriyama’s pictures are taken in Japan’s big cities. Made with a small camera, they show how quickly they were taken. The frame is often tilted, the grain is pronounced, and the contrast is emphasized. He also takes pictures of people in bars, strip clubs, on the streets, or in alleyways. The movement of the people creates a blurred image.
His work is in many famous collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Tate Britain, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Moriyama has had major solo shows at The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; The Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo.
In 2012, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography, New York.
Although the photobook is a popular presentation format among Japanese photographers, Moriyama has been particularly prolific, producing more than 150 photobooks since 1968. His creative career has been honored by a number of solo exhibitions at major institutions, as well as his two-person exhibition with William Klein at the Tate Modern in 2012-13. He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hasselblad Award in 2019 and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2012.
He currently lives and works in Tokyo.
