The Photographers Gallery – Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective

Printed Paper Voucher Required

Exhibition dates: 6 October 2023 – 11 February 2024

For more than sixty years, Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) has used his camera to interrogate and revolutionise the way we look at the world with his dense, grainy images. Even today, Moriyama’s pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain groundbreaking.

The exhibition will trace the path of a photographer who transformed the way we see photography and questioned the very nature of photography itself. The retrospective will focus on different moments of Moriyama’s vast and productive career – beginning with his early works for Japanese magazines, interest in the American occupation and engagement with photorealism. During this time Moriyama also established his unique aesthetic, famously known by the Japanese phrase are, bure, boke (meaning ‘grainy, blurry, out of focus’).

The second part of the exhibition picks up his work from the self-reflexive period in the 1980s and 1990s. In the decades which followed, he explored the essence of photography and of his own self, developing a visual lyricism with which he reflected on reality, memory and cities through tireless documentation and the reinvention of his own archive. Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, will bring together many of Moriyama’s rare photobooks and magazines alongside more than 200 works and large-scale installations, for the first time in the UK.

Image Credits:
Tokyo, 1969. From Accident, Premeditated or not. © Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.