Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama – Three years of apprenticeship with Shomei Tometsu

Daido Moriyama was born on 10 October 1938 in Ikeda in the Japanese prefecture of Osaka. He studied photography with Takeji Iwamiya and in 1961 went to Tokyo to join the important photography group VIVO - shortly before its disbandment - to which his role model Shomei Tometsu belonged. Daido Moriyama found a position as assistant to the photographer and film producer Eikoh Hosoe and helped with the realisation of the famous illustrated book Barakei: Killed by Rose (re-released later under the title Ordeal by Roses), for which the actor and poet Yukio Mishima stood as model. Moriyama went self-employed as photographer in 1964 and created numerous shots around the US American military base in Yokosuka. It was during this time that he began the long-term friendship with the photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira, who died in 2015. In 1968, he published his first book of photographs, Japan, a Theatre, for which Shuji Terayama and Muromachi Shobo wrote the texts. 

Intuitive photography without a viewfinder

Daido Moriyama was initially interested in the dark side of urban life, drawn with his camera to the places in the shadows, where he wanted to make visible the repressed and hidden, and later also dedicated himself to exploring the medium of photography. At the beginning, his visual style largely corresponded to that of the small experimental photography magazine Provoke, on which he had collaborated since the second issue in 1969: The black and white shots are rough and grainy, the details blurred and out of focus. For his view of the fringes of society, the red-light districts, and quite simply the city streets, he developed a pioneering technique of intuitive photography in which he deliberately refrained from looking through the viewfinder when he pressed the shutter release. Seen as revolutionary, this approach influenced many young Japanese photographers and was also well received internationally. Daido Moriyama himself drew important inspiration from his compatriots Seiryu Inoue, Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe and the American artists William Klein and Andy Warhol. 

Sober view of photography

Daido Moriyama liked to present his work in illustrated books, publishing over 150 since 1968. In the 1970s, Moriyama also started photographing in colour, but this part of his work was exhibited and recognised significantly less than the extremely successful black and white pictures which he first created in analog and later digital. He himself was aware of the fact that this change represented a radical cut and that his later digital photographs did not achieve the expressive power of the early analog works. But photography is nothing more than light and shadow, and the camera is only a copying machine, Moriyama decided, vehemently rejecting all rapture and the mystification of his work. Dido Moriyama has received prizes and awards for his art, was Photographer of the Year in 1983 in his native Japan, received the Cultural Award of the German Society of Photography in 2004, and the Hasselblad Foundation Award in 2019.