Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Daidō Moriyama's photographic journey has been one of constant reinvention, testament to his unrelenting pursuit of the unexpected, chaotic, and the intensely personal. Moriyama is one of Japanese photography’s most active and iconic figures. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed Japan in the second half of the 20th century, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural paradox of age-old traditions which persist within the country’s modern society. He embraced the camera’s potential as a mechanical tool for unselfconscious recording. A leading exponent of what became known as the are-bure-boke (‘rough, blurred, out-of-focus’) approach, Moriyama’s photography liberated subsequent generations of photographers from the existing norms of technical and aesthetic practise.
Moriyama’s work has been collected by numerous prominent public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He has had major solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, The Fotomuseum, Winterthur, The Folkwang, Essen, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Tate Modern, London. His accolades include the Japan Photo Critics Association new artist’s award, the Photographic Society of Japan’s annual award, and the Hasselblad Award.
The Photographers’ Gallery held a major retrospective of Moriyama's work in 2023-2024. Since then, the Print Sales department continues to work with Moriyama, offering signed silver gelatin prints in a range of sizes, starting at £1,250 + VAT.