Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama’s Career and Tokyo in the 1960s

Daido Moriyama was born in 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, now Ikeda City. After studying commercial design, he encountered photography at the studio of Takeji Iwamiya and moved to Tokyo in 1961. By the time he sought to join the photography collective VIVO, it was already moving toward dissolution. He instead became Eikoh Hosoe’s assistant and witnessed the production of Ordeal by Roses. He began working independently in 1964, photographing areas around U.S. military bases, theaters, and streets for photography magazines. The chronology of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation also notes that his association with Takuma Nakahira began during this period.^*3

In 1968, Moriyama published his first photobook, Japan: A Photo Theater, pairing his photographs with text by Shūji Terayama, and joined PROVOKE with its second issue that same year. In 1970, he published “First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty”; in 1972, he released Farewell Photography and A Hunter. That July, he launched the self-published magazine Record, producing five issues through 1973. His method took shape through magazines, photobooks, photography made while traveling, rephotography, and printing before it did through exhibitions. This is crucial to understanding Moriyama as more than a photographer of the street: he is an artist who has worked with the very forms through which photographs circulate.^*22

Moriyama’s early visual formation drew on Iwamiya and Hosoe, as well as Shomei Tomatsu through VIVO, Takuma Nakahira, and the photobooks of William Klein and Robert Frank. Fondation Cartier describes how Moriyama developed a way of photographing while moving through the city, using a small camera as though it were an extension of his body. Seen within this lineage, are-bure-boke did not emerge suddenly from a single fashionable style. It developed across postwar documentary photography, the photobook, and street snapshots.^*24

Reading Moriyama’s work of the late 1960s backward from the “Daido Moriyama look” established later can obscure the trial and error of his early years. Philip Charrier examines the formative period from 1966 to 1972 through Moriyama’s collaboration with Shūji Terayama, magazine series such as Accident and A Journey to Something, and the making of his early photobooks. He argues that Moriyama’s photographs contained a tension between photography as a cold, authentic record and the image as an emotional re-creation of contact with the external world.^*27 From this perspective, grain and blur were not a fully formed signature from the outset. They took shape as Moriyama sought to retain both journalistic “fact” and embodied experience within the photograph.

Jan-Frederik Rust’s doctoral dissertation analyzes Moriyama’s photobooks and magazine work from 1965 to 1978 through editing, page sequence, printing, collaboration, and the reuse of previously published photographs, as well as through individual images.^*26 By treating Japan: A Photo Theater, Farewell Photography, and A Hunter as works with distinct editorial logics instead of containers for exhibition prints, the study confirms that the photobook was not a secondary mode of presentation for Moriyama, but a site of production where the meaning of photographs was reconfigured.

PROVOKE and a Language Specific to Photography

Daido Moriyama is closely associated with Provoke, but that association alone narrows the scope of work that extends across magazines, photobooks, the street, and reproductive media. PROVOKE was an experimental photography magazine founded in 1968 by Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Kōji Taki, Takahiko Okada, and others. Subtitled “Provocative Materials for Thought,” it included Moriyama beginning with its second issue.^*4 The “language specific to photography” sought by PROVOKE was less an abstruse concept than an attempt to make the sensations of an era that words could not fully explain legible through photography’s material elements. Grain grows coarse, the frame tilts, focus slips, adjacent photographs collide on the page, and the image deteriorates in reproduction. When such phenomena carry meaning, the photograph ceases to be an illustration for a text and becomes a medium for thinking photographically. In an Aperture interview, Simon Baker describes PROVOKE photography as a subjective, expressive medium conveying lived experience in Tokyo from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, rather than a medium of objective explanation.^*5 In a text on Accident, Moriyama likewise writes that photography records truth yet is also a lie, and that, while holding this contradiction, it becomes “a language” beyond verbal language.^*6

The theoretical background of PROVOKE cannot be reduced to a simple anti-establishment movement. Philip Charrier analyzes Kōji Taki’s arguments of 1967–68 as an attempt, informed by structuralism and semiotics, to use photographs resistant to established linguistic codes to expose relations of power and knowledge embedded in the urban environment.^*29 The method contained a paradox. Are-bure-boke, which deliberately “misused” the camera to disrupt legible codes, became recognizable as a new style as it spread. Understanding Moriyama therefore requires seeing it as a movement in conflict with stylization itself, beyond assessing its appearance as a style that could be imitated.

Gyewon Kim examines avant-garde photography in 1960s Japan through the material conditions of paper, printing, and the magazine page, as well as through the cities photographed. She argues that PROVOKE rejected conventional photojournalism and naive realism while seeking to connect avant-garde experimentation and documentary photography as a method of social critique.^*30 Grain, blocked-up shadows, and sequences extending across pages matter in Moriyama’s photographs because they reconstruct the city’s speed and fragmentation in the material form of print, in addition to depicting the city as their subject.

Visual Culture During the High-Growth Era and PROVOKE

PROVOKE’s provocation was necessary because, as Japan moved from postwar reconstruction into rapid economic growth, photography was increasingly absorbed into the clarity of news reporting and the consumer imagery of advertising. MoMA explains that PROVOKE’s roughness, blur, and lack of focus stood in sharp contrast to the public imagery of the time and sought to unsettle a Japanese photographic culture inclined toward sober European-style photojournalism and straightforward commercial photography.^*4 Coarse grain and unstable compositions were therefore more than the results of careless shooting. They provided a way to return the anxiety, desire, chance, and political tension felt on the street to the orderly, easily understood consumer images made by advertising and magazines. The Photographers’ Gallery similarly presents Moriyama’s career of more than sixty years as work that has challenged how photographs are seen and reconsidered the nature of photography itself.^*7

Moriyama’s own recollections are also important in keeping this historical setting from being reduced to political slogans. In an SFMOMA interview, he recalls that from Yokosuka during the Vietnam War until around 1970, young artists in Japan shared a sense of rebellion against and criticism of their genres, their worlds, and politics. He says, however, that he was moved by feelings of rebellion and criticism arising from everyday life rather than by the expression of a direct political message.^*31 His rough images are therefore better understood as unstable perceptions formed by physically moving through a politicized society than as illustrations of political circumstances, an interpretation closer to his own account.

Are-Bure-Boke and Urban Perception

Moriyama’s coarse grain, strong contrast, tilted compositions, camera shake, and lack of focus do not organize the city into a clean view. They preserve the photographer’s close proximity to subjects encountered in the street and his movement at the moment of exposure. Fondation Cartier explains that Moriyama, with a small camera in hand, photographed while running or from a moving car, using grainy, blurred, tilted images to reveal unsettling aspects of the streets and alleys of Japan’s major cities.^*8 The idea that Moriyama’s photographs touch reality is more than an abstract metaphor. When he photographs the city, signs, television screens, posters, movie screens, and car windshields become elements of the same frame as buildings and people. In an SFMOMA interview, Moriyama says that he approaches cities, cars, people, television screens, posters, and movie screens from the same point of view.^*9 In Moriyama’s city, reality appears both as an unmediated landscape and as existing images in print, video, posters, and screens. To draw these subjects into a single frame, his compositions become close, fragmentary, and strongly contrasted.

On the Road and the Snapshot in Motion

What Moriyama took from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was more than the freedom of travel. It was a responsiveness to fragments of roads, people, cities, and time encountered en route, with the destination taking second place. Penguin Random House introduces the book as a story about the search for meaning and “authentic experience” through cross-country journeys.^*10 In Moriyama’s own text published by C/O Berlin, he recalls reading On the Road when he was young, becoming fascinated by Sal Paradise’s “eyes for the road,” acquiring a friend’s old Toyota, and beginning to travel roads throughout Japan.^*11 SFMOMA also records that Moriyama hitchhiked around Japan, traveled highways day and night, stopped at run-down cafés, and photographed through car windows, and that these images were serialized in Camera Mainichi beginning in 1968.^*2 Moriyama says that the dog in Stray Dog, Misawa appeared walking toward him as he moved through the city of Misawa, and that he photographed it in an instant.^*9 Moriyama’s snapshots do not record planned subjects in sequence. He rides, walks, turns, looks through a window, and glances back. Along the way, signs, dogs, passersby, light, roadways, and storefronts suddenly enter his view, and the shutter is released before deliberation. This is a gaze through which the body responds to fragments of the city, not a perspective that organizes the city from above.

Photobooks, Magazines, and Reproductive Media

Moriyama’s importance lies not only in individual masterpieces but in his sustained inquiry into how photographs are arranged, reproduced, degraded, and given different meanings in magazines and photobooks. His effort to weaken authorship and style in Farewell Photography was not an abrupt act of self-negation, but a response to an era when photographs already circulated as copies. Aperture describes the book as a photobook that includes photographs, cut-up negatives, and even works by other artists, revealing a process intended to negate authorship and style.^*12 Moriyama kept a photograph from resolving into “a single picture I took beautifully.” By mixing failed negatives, other people’s images, rough printing, and page sequences, he destabilized the questions of who owns a photograph and at what point it becomes a work. This idea also connects with Warhol’s reproductive images, which strongly attracted Moriyama at the time. SFMOMA describes Accident as a Warhol-like series that remade existing images through newspaper and magazine clippings and rephotography.^*2 What mattered to Moriyama about Warhol was less the Pop surface than the way existing photographs of accidents and other events acquired an intensity distinct from the events themselves as they were copied repeatedly across newspapers, magazines, and television. In an SFMOMA interview, Moriyama says that he sees the essence of photography in copying and reproduction and strongly identified with Warhol’s method.^*9

The privately published Record, which Moriyama began in 1972, differed from a photobook selecting only finished signature works. It was a form through which he continually released photographs taken at a given moment in small booklets. The first five issues appeared from 1972 to 1973, during the same period as Farewell Photography and A Hunter, creating another circuit that repeatedly brought photography and publication close together without containing the work’s completion within a single volume. The official publication chronology lists Record as an independent publishing activity, further confirming that how images were printed, sequenced, and distributed mattered as much to Moriyama’s work as how they were photographed.^*22

Moriyama later called Record his “personal medium,” distinguishing it from a conventional photobook organized around a theme. He also specifically attributed the suspension of its initial run in 1973 to the sharp rise in printing costs caused by the oil crisis.^*32 This shows that his photographic work was shaped by the material conditions of printing costs, publication scale, and distribution as well as by aesthetics. In bringing “taking photographs” close to “printing them and passing them on to others,” Record became one of the media that most directly expressed Moriyama’s refusal to think of photography solely as an exhibition object.

Key Works and Composition

In Japan: A Photo Theater, theater, spectacle, street figures, and popular culture intermingle, presenting the city in postwar Japan as a theatrical space. SFMOMA’s account of Japan Theater reads its figures as actual performers who also become metaphorical presences marked by the uncertain modernity of the 1960s.^*2 ON THE ROAD is identified in SFMOMA’s collection records as a gelatin silver print from 1969.^*13 Its title also points to Moriyama’s extension of the experience of photographing in motion into sequences in photobooks and magazines. Discussing Grand Level, Yubari, The Met explains that Moriyama documented life in postwar Japan and was influenced by avant-garde Japanese photography and the tilted documentary approach of William Klein.^*14 Moriyama’s approach is close to documentary photography in its engagement with society and the street. Yet he transformed documentary form: instead of an objective report aligned along horizontal and vertical axes, images made from excessive proximity, tilted frames, stark blacks and whites, and moments of movement convey urban disorder as a bodily sensation.

The Meaning and Translation of Are-Bure-Boke

The phrase is romanized as are-bure-boke, which MoMA describes as “grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus.” Are refers to coarse grain or a rough printed surface, bure to image blur caused by movement of the camera or subject, and boke to a lack of focus. The three terms are not synonyms for the same indistinctness; they disrupt photographic clarity at the separate levels of grain, movement, and focus.^*4 The Art Institute of Chicago likewise identifies coarse grain, blur, and lack of focus as elements characterizing the photographic language of PROVOKE.^*18

MoMA treats the term as an expression that gained currency around PROVOKE in the late 1960s.^*4 The Art Institute of Chicago’s material also does not identify a single person who coined it. The sources trace its origin to the words are, bure, and boke, but do not establish a sole originator.^*18

Differences from Takuma Nakahira

Takuma Nakahira was one of PROVOKE’s theoretical centers, but by the early 1970s he had begun criticizing the consolidation of are-bure-boke into an artist-specific style and moved toward a more literal mode of recording. SFMOMA’s chronology situates his subsequent activities, including this abrupt change in direction.^*19 Moriyama, by contrast, continued to link coarse grain, strong contrast, blur, and lack of focus to the perception of the street after PROVOKE ended. Read alongside MoMA’s discussion of Nakahira, their difference becomes clearer when they are not grouped as photographers sharing the same look: Nakahira sought to leave behind its stylization, while Moriyama continued to embrace the indeterminate image as a bodily experience of the street.^*20

Beyond a Fixed Reading of Are-Bure-Boke

As Moriyama’s international profile grew, are-bure-boke also became a convenient label for explaining his entire body of work. A 2022 Aperture essay argues that reading his dark, rough photographs solely as a mirror of the social conditions of postwar Japan reaches only the surface of Moriyama’s concerns; at their core is a question directed at the medium itself: what is photography?^*12 Given his attempt to dismantle authorship and a finished style in Farewell Photography, fixing are-bure-boke as Moriyama’s definitive style contradicts his own act of self-negation in the early 1970s. His continuity lies in his sustained inquiry into where an image becomes a photograph as he moved across the street, rephotography, magazines, photobooks, color, and digital media, rather than in the repetition of a single look.

Within photographic history, Moriyama’s shift becomes still more specific. Masafumi Fukagawa argues that Moriyama challenged the realism and the “photo essay” (kumi shashin) that held a strong position in postwar Japan, the conceptions of photography represented by Yōnosuke Natori and Ken Domon, and the very norms of modern photography.^*28 The crucial point is not that he changed “beautiful photographs into rough photographs,” but that he unsettled the assumption that photographers could grasp the world correctly and explain it to viewers in an orderly way. The self-destructive editing of Farewell Photography made this conflict within photographic history visible in its most extreme form.

International Reception and Place in Photographic History

A major turning point in Moriyama’s international reception was New Japanese Photography, held at MoMA in 1974. The Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation’s chronology records that the exhibition traveled from MoMA to SFMOMA and other venues.^*3 SFMOMA’s Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, which toured beginning in 1999, used approximately two hundred black-and-white works and large Polaroid works to examine the relationship between postwar Japanese society and Western influence, particularly that of the United States.^*15 At issue here is neither simple admiration for American culture nor simple rejection of it. U.S. military bases, jazz, bars, imported goods, and the desire for American-style affluence had entered the postwar urban landscape in ways inseparable from the security-treaty system, memories of the occupation, and unease at the rapid development of consumer society. SFMOMA’s publication text likewise explains that Moriyama’s photographs reveal deep ambivalence toward the embrace of American ideals and embody the cultural dilemma of postwar Japan’s rapid change from an isolationist, fascist society into an international, capitalist one.^*16 The “transformation” of Japanese photography did not simply mean that rough photographs became fashionable. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum explains that Moriyama’s high-contrast, grainy work of the 1960s and 1970s brought about a transformation in Japanese photography, although it was initially criticized as rough, blurred, and out of focus.^*17 More specifically, the criteria of judgment shifted from a view centered on clear photojournalism and commercial photography toward an inquiry into photography’s truth, reproducibility, and embodied nature through photobooks, magazines, rephotography, and subjective snapshots.^*5 In its citation for the 2019 award, the Hasselblad Foundation assesses Provoke as a movement that liberated photography from tradition and reexamined the medium itself, positioning Moriyama as one of the most important artists to emerge from it.^*1 Moriyama’s photographs are records of reality and, at the same time, copies drawn from magazines, television, and advertising. This movement between original and reproduction, document and expression, and street experience and mass-media imagery has been repeatedly addressed in recent retrospectives and collection texts.^*7

Influence on Photobook Culture

In accounts of Moriyama’s international standing, the photobooks themselves have been cited repeatedly alongside his prints. The International Center of Photography positions Moriyama’s photobooks as landmarks of postwar photography, valuing rapid shooting on the street together with editing in print.^*23 Materials from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum retrospective also show that Farewell Photography, A Hunter, and issues 1–5 of Record were concentrated in the PROVOKE period from 1968 to 1972, when photography, publishing, and criticism operated in close succession over a short span.^*21 Moriyama’s influence consequently extends beyond the visual look of are-bure-boke to Japan’s photobook culture, in which photographs are edited as books, magazines, and series and delivered to viewers as reproductions.

Works by Moriyama are also held in the National Gallery of Art’s collection, giving him an enduring place in international collections of photographic history beyond the limited context of avant-garde photography within Japan.^*25