Daido Moriyama was born October 10th, 1938, in Ikeda-cho Osaka. He began his Photographic career under Takeji Iwamiya, a photographer well known for his garden and architecture photography. In 1961 he moved to Tokyo to study under another photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, where he joined the VIVO photography group. VIVO was a short Japanese photographic movement that was created to deal with and cope with post-war Japanese society and adjust to the changes of life. Under Hosoe, he had a hand in the production of his famous series ‘Ordeal by Roses’. Ordeal by Roses was a series of photographs and books created with the help of novelist Yukio Mishima. This series explored themes of Japanese and Chinese culture, as well as Japanese militarism and postwar society. In 1964, Moriyama became a freelance photographer, and joined the ‘Provoke’ art movement, to become part of their magazine. Daido’s photographs are often described as raw, dirty, dark, or troubled–and shed light on a new aspect of Japanese street photography. 

      Going forward, he created books such as Memories of a Dog and discussed how artists such as Andy Warhol, William Klein, and Shomei Tomatsu were his inspirations in his work. His work impacted both Japan and the USA artistically, and how works have been showcased across the world. He’s famous for using almost solely Ricoh film compact cameras for his over fifty years of photographic work. His work is also mostly in black and white, but in recent years he has actually switched to digital art–as well as adding color to his pieces. 

      Daido likes to shoot with a wide-angle lens but does not like to shoot scenic photographs often, His pieces are often very up close, filling the frame fully with information. He composes photos specifically to hold as much information in them as possible, not liking dead space within his work. He would also use techniques such as a blurred camera lens, and the deep dark shadows, boosting them in some cases so people and animals become obscured in darkness. 

      In 2004, he won the Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement from the International Center of Photography in New York, and then in 2019, he won the Hasselblad award. He has published over 150 photography books, some of which are Japanese Theater (1968), and Hokkaido (2008), and Farewell, Photography (1972). 

My presentation slides can be found here.