Daido Moriyama

Inspired by the likes of Eikoh Hosoe, Eugène Atget, Weegee, and William Klein, photographer Daido Moriyama has made the city his muse. In Tokyo and other cosmopolitan locales, he documents cultural change and urban chaos in an expressive style all his own. Moriyama was a founder of Japan’s Provoke movement; from 1969 to 1970, the group published an avant-garde magazine that artfully documented the dramatic transformation of 1960s post-war Japan. Moriyama, for his part, focused on elements of modernization, the dissolution of traditional Japanese values, and the American military occupation of the country. Typically, the photographer makes grainy, black-and-white, high-contrast images, which he prints himself. He has largely shot with a small handheld automatic camera, rarely with attention to the viewfinder. Moriyama’s work has been acquired for the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Centre Pompidou, among other institutions, and his photographs have sold for five figures at auction.