Daidō Moriyama

Osaka, Nihon · b. 1938

Daidō Moriyama is a Japanese photographer, known primarily for his grainy, high-contrast black-and-white photographs of Tokyo street scenes.  Born in Osaka, Moriyama studied graphic design and photography and moved to Tokyo in 1961, where he worked for three years as an assistant to the filmmaker and photographer Eikoh Hosoe [https://www.artic.edu/artists/68067/eikoh-hosoe]. Influenced by William Klein [https://www.artic.edu/artists/43642/william-klein]’s photography and Jack Kerouac’s 1957 counterculture novel On the Road, Moriyama developed his characteristic style of street photography: raw, often out-of-focus black-and-white images taken by a compact 35mm camera that capture a sensuous yet destabilized urban society. In 1969 he contributed to the short-lived but highly influential Provoke magazine, which portrayed a contemporary world through free-floating images, at once seductive and terrifying. Much like Andy Warhol [https://www.artic.edu/artists/37219/andy-warhol], another one of his influences, Moriyama investigated scenes of trauma (the series Accident) and sexual provocation while also capturing images of the mass youth protests then sweeping the nation. Provoke magazine was most recently the focus of a 2017 Art Institute exhibition Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance [https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2056/provoke-%20photography-in-japan-between-protest-and-performance-1960-1975], as well as the 2012 Ryerson and Burnham Libraries show Rough, Blurred, and Out-of-Focus [https://archive.artic.edu/ryerson/provoke/].  Since 1968 Daidō Moriyama has published more than 150 books of both black-and-white and color photography. In 1999 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized his first US retrospective. In 2019 he won the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award. Moriyama's rigorously improvised photography has influenced artists, especially in Japan but also internationally, including photographer John Gossage [https://www.artic.edu/artists/31311/john-gossage] and painter Christopher Wool [https://www.artic.edu/artists/29038/christopher-wool], both in the United States.