Literature

We perceive countless images all day long and do not always focus on them. Sometimes they are blurry, or fleeting, or just glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The crushing force of time is before my eyes, and I try to keep pressing the shutter release of the camera. - Moriyama Daido

Moriyama Daido has designed and published many seminal photography books - the most influential being Bye Bye Photography, which employs the characteristic printing style that has always underscored his importance as an innovator and visionary. He shoots pictures for his visual diary every day, turning his camera on streets, people, architecture and cultures as diverse as Tokyo, Hawaii and Buenos Aires. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, Moriyama's work occupies a unique space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real. Moriyama's use of a small hand-held automatic camera gives his images a loose and casual aesthetic, undermined by a forceful and decisive point of view. His darkroom style is very personal, producing a unique chiaroscuro, which employs a high-contrast matrix as its métier. It is this control of every aspect of the image-making process that allows him to make such distinctive work. Moriyama's images of his home city, Tokyo, have helped to define that way that the city is viewed, just as Gary Winogrand created the 'look' that was to define New York streets in the 1970's.

Moriyama has written several books on his practice, for instance Memories of a Dog, and Japanese visual culture and he is respected as one of the senior members of the PROVOKE movement whose influence has been hugely significant within the canon of Japanese photography.