Daido Moriyama

Born in Osaka in 1983, Daido Moriyama is one of the few living modern masters of photography from Japan.

Many of his early photographs were influenced by the ‘Provoke’ group which produced magazines almost entirely composed of photography. Provoke was more than just a publication but defined the style of documentary photography that arose out of late 1960s Japan. Highly motivated by the opposition that artists felt towards bourgeois Japan. The group set out to create images that didn’t rely on words for interpretation and came to define a whole aesthetic for grainy, blurry and out of focus images. This signalled a turn towards experimentation against the technical precision favoured at the time.

Moriyama’s oeuvre and aesthetic reflects his feelings about the destabilisation of social structures in Japan. He captures life during and following the American occupation of Japan after World War II; in particular the effects of industrialisation and the consequential shift in urban life in which some areas were left behind the rapidly changing city.

Beyond the social context, Moriyama was pre-occupied and inspired by various international artists, Andy Warhol being the most influential of these. He first saw Warhol’s silkscreens in 1969 on a visit to New York and perceived in them the essence of duplication, repetition and mass production essential to photography. Moriyama went on to make silkscreens of his own, but also made reproduction and duplication a primary focal point of his work, as seen in his repeated attention and production of images of lips, tights, and street signs.

Daido Moriyama’s work has been exhibition widely in Japan and internationally including New Japanese Photography (MoMA, 1974), Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog (SFMOMA, 1999–2000), Daido Moriyama (Fracture) (LACMA, 2012), William Klein + Daido Moriyama (Tate Modern, London, 2012), and Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective (The Photographers' Gallery, London, 2023–2024). His photographs can be found in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and more.