Daido Moriyama Captured the Soul of Postwar Japan in Gritty, Groundbreaking Photographs

Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) spent his groundbreaking and illustrious career photographing the streets of Tokyo, exploring the city’s gritty underbelly with his handheld film camera.

His black-and-white photographs—which feature subjects from train passengers to a car on fire to aerial views of postwar Tokyo—reveal Moriyama’s dramatic documentary style as he plays with light and shadow. Moriyama’s prolific work is marked by his sharp eye for subjects, use of heavy contrast, and tilted images.

Daido Moriyama: Quartet includes four seminal photobooks that established Moriyama as a radical, cutting-edge photographer: Japan: A Photo Theater, A Hunter, Farewell Photography, and Light and Shadow. Spanning the late 1960s to the early 1980s, his works uncover the landscape and humanity of postwar Japan. Edited by Mark Holborn, this compilation paints a picture of the history, pop culture and artistic practices that characterized Moriyama’s career and features an intimate look into his diaries and personal memorabilia. Holborn expertly describes Moriyama’s priority to “seize time” with his photographs, as well as his legacy chronicling the rawness of human experience and urban life in Japan. Presented in a slipcase, this volume is essential for all Moriyama fans and anyone passionate about photography and visual culture.