Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama is one of the few living modern masters of photography from Japan. Part of Japan’s Provoke Movement in the 1960’s, Moriyama sought to engender political and cultural dialogue with his photographs. His photographs and photography books are some of the most sought after by distinguished collectors. 

<span class="title">Untitled (Lips 9 Times)<span class="title_comma">, </span></span><span class="year">2001</span>
<span class="title">SHINJUKU, TOKYO 1995<span class="title_comma">, </span></span><span class="year">1998</span>
<span class="title">The City I Always Had a Hard Time Leaving<span class="title_comma">, </span></span><span class="year">1976</span>
<span class="title">Tokyo<span class="title_comma">, </span></span><span class="year">1974</span>
<span class="title">KARIUDO (Hunter)<span class="title_comma">, </span></span><span class="year">1972</span>
<span class="title">Smash-up<span class="title_comma">, </span></span><span class="year">1969</span>
Daido Moriyama
Untitled (Lips 9 Times), 2001
Silkscreen on canvas, black on silver
40 1/3 x 60 in.
Edition of 3
© Daido Moriyama

Moriyama’s oeuvre includes colour pictures, Polaroids, films, installations and most rare and importantly, silkscreens. Whilst Moriyama was influenced by a variety of artists, Andy Warhol may be the most important 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. Since then, Moriyama has made large scale, limited edition silkscreens with singular images and more often with repeated or combined imagery.

 

Recognised immediately for their gritty and mysterious style, Moriyama’s silkscreens pay tribute to the multiple aspects of his practise from his initial projects made in Tokyo in the sixties, to his compositional studies in the eighties and nineties.