About the Artist

Daido Moriyama

Born 1938 in Osaka, Daido Moriyama is an established Japanese photographer with worldwide reputation. Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography under Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe as an assistant. He went independent in 1964 and was involved in the photo fanzine Provoke between 1968 and 1970. By 1972, Moriyama has published Japan: A Photo Theater and Farewell Photography, with both showing his grainy, high-contrast images that came to be referred to as “are, bure, boke” (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus). He has made a radical impact on the photography scenes in both Japan and the West with this expressive style, characterized by his quick snapshots that sometimes come from forsaking the viewfinder entirely.

Moriyama has frequently held solo exhibitions and large-scale retrospectives since the 1990s: in 1999, his solo show toured San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Exhibitions were held again in New York and London in 2002 and in Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris in 2003; From 2004 to 2009, Moriyama was invited to undertake a number of retrospectives in European cities such as Cologne, Amsterdam, and Oslo; From 2010 to 2016, his works could be seen across the world in cities such as London, Beijing and Taipei. Moriyama’s works have been collected by many important public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, J. Paul Getty Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and Tate Modern in London.