Daido Moriyama at LACMA

Shinjuku #11 2000

Photographer Daido Moriyama (Japan, b. 1938) first came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his gritty depictions of Japanese urban life. His highly innovative and intensely personal photographic approach often incorporates high contrast, graininess, and tilted vantages to convey the fragmentary nature of modern realities. Fracture: Daido Moriyama presents a range of the artist’s renowned black-and-white photographs, exemplifying the radical aesthetic of are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus), as well as the debut of recent color work taken in Tokyo. A selection of his photo books—Moriyama has published more than forty to date—highlights the artist’s highly influential experimentation with reproduction media and the transformative possibilities of the printed page.  In total, Moriyama’s achievements convey the artist’s boldly intuitive exploration of urban mystery, memory, and photographic invention.
Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography with Takeji Iwaniya, a professional photographer of architecture and crafts. Moving to Tokyo in 1961, he assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe for three years and became familiar with the trenchant social critiques produced by photographer Shomei Tomatsu. He also drew inspiration from William Klein’s confrontational photographs of New York, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima.

Beauty parlor, Tokyo, c1975

Tokyo, 1981

Kagero (Mayfly) 1972

 Fracture: Daido Moriyama
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
April 7, 2012 - July 31, 2012