Caption: A sprawling retrospective on Moriyama, a giant of Japanese street photography, is on view at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, as part of annual international photo festival Kyotographie.
Daido Moriyama is one of my favorite photographers. You can check out his work in Kyoto now.
Selectedc text (Thu-Huong Ha) and photos (JOHAN BROOKS) from The Japan Times, April 23, 2026.
Daido Moriyama isn’t precious with his photos; he shoots endlessly, automatically. As a new exhibition suggests, we shouldn’t be precious either.
A large-scale retrospective of the giant of Japanese street photography opened April 18 at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, as part of annual international photo festival Kyotographie. After premiering in 2023 at Instituto Moreira Salles in Sao Paulo and making its way across Europe, the exhibit is showing in Japan for the first time.
“Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective” is massive in scale as well as in scope, covering decades of Moriyama’s work from the 1960s to the present. A discerning viewer will need hours of energy and focused attention to take everything in, not only on the walls, which feature nearly 200 images and 250 printed pages, but on tables that stretch along the galleries. There are another 150 magazines collected, with around 40 books for people to browse, from Moriyama’s acclaimed 2002 photobook “Shinjuku” to his recent “Pretty Woman,” and even a guidebook to Tokyo. The effect is a dizzying, at times overwhelming tunnel of blurred faces and body parts in black and white.
Moriyama, 87, born in 1938 in Osaka Prefecture, is often praised for the way he captured postwar Japan reeling from defeat and pushing quickly toward Westernization. But this characterization only captures a relatively small and early portion of Moriyama’s work, which began in 1965 with his first important series, “Pantomime,” set in an obstetrics and gynecology hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture. Though he initially followed rules of classical photography with sharp and focused composition lines, by the late 1960s Moriyama had already begun to break away, capturing subcultures, experimental theater performers and working class life in Japan.
“He shifted to build a less pretentious look at society,” says exhibition curator Thyago Nogueira, head of the contemporary art department at Instituto Moreira Salles Brazil, during a media preview. “He started to document that expression of culture in society, and to build a different eye that was formulating a certain kind of photography that was more introspective and more subjective, a little tilted, dark.”
Moriyama was focused on examining how photos were used by mass media to mediate reality. He photographed images of major events, like the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as shown on TV and in newspapers, as a commentary on visual culture at the time.
“It was important to me to show how Moriyama was part of a generation of people working in an industry of image-making,” Nogueira tells The Japan Times. “They were not only changing the industry, but also changing the vocabulary and the language of photography in a very clever and self-conscious way.”
Moriyama was anti-elite and favored printed materials that could be cheaply produced and circulated easily. (Although decades later production and distribution would become essentially free, and paper would start to seem like a luxury.)
“He was always saying, ‘I'm not interested in dogmatism, I'm not interested in the fetishization of photography. I'm interested in shared conversations,’” Nogueira says. “The deep, philosophical questions he’s asking about photography were being asked in fanzines, in a very cheap Xerox.”
Moriyama, who is still actively working, is ultimately interested in what a photo is for; but throughout his career he has maintained a skeptical stance not just toward the value of photos as art, but the promise of photojournalism.
“That naivety to think you could try and create masterpieces, that naive humanism to try and help people through your art — that is just too optimistic for me,” Moriyama said in 1971. “I am already struggling just to keep grasp of my own existence.”
Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/04/23/art/daido-moriyama-retrospective-kyotographie/
There's a whole lot going on at the annual international photo festival Kyotographie. Check out thier website.
https://www.kyotographie.jp/en/programs/2026/
