Daido moriyama - A Legend

Although Moriyama's work is well known in his homeland where he is one of the country's major photographers, his photography has only been sporadically and incompletely exhibited outside Japan, and it has not received the full critical attention it so richly deserves.
Born in the port city of Osaka in 1938, Moriyama turned to photography at the age of twenty-one and moved to Tokyo to work with the eminent photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Early in his career, Moriyama became appreciative of the work of both William Klein and Andy Warhol. He appreciated their new vision and transformed it through his own personal perspective. The energy and dynamic approach Moriyama found in the emotional, even hostile pictures Klein made of his native New York intrigued the burgeoning Japanese photographer, as did the perception of a voyeuristic media culture in Warhol's work.
Moriyama's pictures are taken in the streets of Japan's major cities. Made with a small, hand-held camera, they reveal the quickness with which they were snapped. Often the frame is deliberately not straight, the grain pronounced, and the contrast emphasized. Among his city images are those shot in dark bars, strip clubs, on the streets or in alleyways, with the movement of the subject creating a shadowy suggestion of a form rather than a distinct figure.
Moriyama's style was also part of this intense period in Japanese art. Much of the work produced in Japan in theater, film, literature, art, and photography appears radical today as it represented a clear disjunction from the past. Japanese artistic production of the 1960s and 1970s was deeply affected by the The States occupation and its conflicting messages of democracy and control, of peaceful coexistence, and of the strong American presence in Asia during the Vietnam War.
Radical artists, including Moriyama, sought a solid break with the highly regulated Japanese society that was responsible for the war, as well as an affirmation of the vitality of a pre-modern culture that was specifically Japanese. Thus, the pictures Moriyama took of the American Navy base Yokosuka -- reflecting the freedom he saw there -- and the stray dog near the Air Force base at Misawa acknowledge both the liberating newness of the modern experience and its rawness.
In the early 1980s, his work distanced itself from the ambiguity and graininess of his earlier photographs toward a bleaker, more distinct vision, as evidenced in the Light and Shadow series.

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