Daido Moriayama: A Retrospective

Featuring over 200 works, spanning from 1964 until the present day, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective traverses different moments of Moriyama’s vast and productive career.

Taking over the whole Gallery, this exhibition celebrates one of the most innovative and influential artists and street photographers of our day. Championing photography as a democratic 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 tirelessly unpretentious, raw, blurred, radical and grainy and has defined the style of an entire generation. Moriyama has spent his sixty-year career asking a fundamental question: what is photography? He rejected the dogmatism of art and the veneration of vintage prints, making the accessible and reproducible aspects of photography its most radical asset.

“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

The journey through the galleries unfolds with glimpses of Tokyo's street life, shots between seductive women, cigarettes, city lights, neon glow and the secret realm of Tokyo night life . Within those lens, you will witness the crossroads of tradition and modernity in Japan in a post-war era undergoing rapid Westernization.

Shot in Moriyama’s signature ‘Bure Boke’ style - high contrast, black tones, graininess of silver print were intensified developing and printing. Everything seems to be a blur, out of focus, dark and sometimes frightful, suggesting an ambiguous and subjective perspective of the modern world.

What truly distinguishes Daido Moriyama, is not its aspiration for objective representation of the world surrounding him. Rather, it thrives on the impossibility of such truth, skillfully obscuring the boundaries between fiction and reality and the interpretation bestowed upon that reality through an image.

“What photography can do, should do, is capture with our own eyes those fragments of reality that are completely impossible to capture with words.” – Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective
6 October 2023 – 11 February 2024
The Photographer’s Gallery London