Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective
Organized by Instituto Moreira Salles
Curated by Thyago Nogueira, Instituto Moreira Salles
Over the course of his sixty-year career, Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka) decisively altered how we experience photography. He used his camera to investigate post-war Japanese society and document his surroundings, but he also questioned the nature of photography itself.
His unmistakable visual language is as lauded as his countless publications, which are central to his work.
This retrospective will be the first to exhibit most of his famous series along with dozens of Moriyama’s photobooks and magazines, plus numerous works and large-scale installations. Taken together, is presents one of the most innovative and influential artists and street photographers of our day.
Moriyama’s photographic subjects captivated viewers from the start, whether he was working with mass media and advertisements, societal taboos, or the theatricality of everyday life. He captured the clash of Japanese tradition and accelerated Westernization following the US military occupation of Japan after the end of World War II. Inspired by US artists such as Andy Warhol and William Klein, the photographer vivisected burgeoning consumer society in Japan. He explored the reproducibility of images, their dissemination, and consumption. Over and again, Moriyama placed his archive of images in new contexts, playing with enlargements, crops, and image resolution. Even today, his pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain groundbreaking.
Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is the product of a three-year research period, and is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever mounted of this artist’s work. It is organized by Instituto Moreira Salles in cooperation with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Chosen by The Guardian as the year`s best photo show in London. This show has been presented at Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo), C/O Berlin, The Photographer’s Gallery (London), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki) and PhotoElysée (Lausanne), at Fotografia Europea it arrives for its first Italian stop.
