Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective

“Forget everything you’ve learned on the subject of photography for the moment, and just shoot. Take photographs - of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don’t pause to think." – Daido Moriyama

Featuring over two hundred works, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective highlights different moments of Moriyama’s sixty-year career, celebrating one of the most innovative and influential artists and street photographers of our time. Championing photography as a mainstream language, Moriyama inserted himself up close with Japanese society, capturing the clash of Japanese tradition with an accelerated Westernization in post-war Japan. With his non-conformist approach and desire to challenge the medium, his work is unapologetically raw and radical and asks the question, what is photography?

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is the first exhibition in the UK to showcase many of his rare photobooks and magazines. These publications will be on show alongside large-scale works and installations. The exhibition starts with Moriyama’s early work for Japanese magazines, his challenging of photojournalism, his experiments in Provoke magazine and the conceptual radicalization of his photobook Farewell Photography. The second part starts in the 1980s, when Moriyama overcame a creative and personal crisis. In the following decades, he explored the essence of photography and of his own self, developing a visual lyricism with which he reflected on reality, memory and history. Moriyama renewed street photography inside and outside Japan. His wanderings led him to cover Tokyo, Osaka and Hokkaido, and also New York, Paris, São Paulo and Cologne.

For Provoke #2, Tokyo, 1969. © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.

From Pretty Woman, Tokyo, 2017. © Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.

Yokosuka, 1965. From Japan, a Photo Theater. © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is open at The Photographers' Gallery until 11th February 2024.