Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka, Japan) is amongst Japan’s most celebrated photographers, renowned for his radical approach to both medium and subject. Initially trained in graphic design, Moriyama moved to Tokyo in 1961 to pursue a career as a freelance photographer. There, he became the most prominent artist to emerge from the short lived yet profoundly influential Provoke movement, based around the experimental photography magazine of the same name. Moriyama’s bold, uncompromising images, with their grainy aesthetic and gritty subject matter embraced the subjective philosophy of Provoke, liberating photography from tradition and interrogating the very nature of the medium. His first major series, Japan: A Photo Theatre, was published as a photo book in 1968. It documented the vast urbanisation experienced by Tokyo, and more generally Japan, in the wake of the Second World War, recording a disintegration of traditional values and revealing the dark underbelly of city life. Influenced by the work of William Klein and Andy Warhol, as well as the writings of Jack Kerouac and the experimental theatre of Shūji Terayama, Moriyama in turn has extensively inspired subsequent generations of photographers with his discordant impressions of city life and chaotic vision of everyday existence.
Text courtesy Simon Lee Gallery.
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Ocula Feature Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection By Jane O’Sullivan, Sydney Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is both unyieldingly monumental and humble. In the latest presentation of the work in Sydney, all 3,000 of the diaries he has collected from Beijing’s fleamarkets are placed in neat rows on a large, rectangular plinth. Dated from 1949 to 1999 they record 50 turbulent years in China’s history....
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Related Press Daido Moriyama: An interview with Bree Zucker 9 January 2017, BOMB Magazine Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama has garnered near-cultic fascination since his images began to infiltrate the American consciousness in the late 1990s. At that time, his work rode to prominence on the wave of discovery surrounding Japanese photography—especially for book enthusiasts, who championed the strangely beautiful amalgam of poetic...
Related Press Tokyo: photogenic to its very core 14 December 2016, The Japan Times With Tokyo being the object of so many excellent photographers’ interest over the last 150 odd years, it’s entirely legitimate that the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum should be bringing it home. What’s on display in the first exhibition, displayed on the third floor, is a selection from the museum’s world-class permanent...
Related Press The urban chaos of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama 30 May 2016, Art Radar Journal Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris launched a major show of the Japanese photographer’s most recent work in February 2016. Charting some of Moriyama’s most significant oeuvre of the past decade, the exhibition brings to the fore the artist’s lesser-known colour photography as well as a new body of...
Related Press Photographers in Focus: Daido Moriyama 12 April 2016, Nowness Arguably East Asia’s most famous street photographer, Daido Moriyama has gained an international cult following for his uncompromising, high-contrast black and white shots of Tokyo’s bustling streets. A new documentary from Italian director Andrea Cossu delves into the world of the master photographer’s often-overlooked color...
Related Video & Audio Daido Moriyama: The Mighty Power 20 December 2014, Nowness / 11 December 2012 Acclaimed Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama's sensual approach to the urban landscape is revealed in this edifying short by the Hong Kong-based filmmaker Ringo Tang. Now in his 70s, Moriyama shot to fame when his grainy black-and-white images depicting a post-war Japan in flux won the country's New Artist Award in 1967 and has since had major...
