For more than 50 years, photographer Daidō Moriyama has walked the streets of his native Japan with a compact camera in hand creating high-contrast, grainy images of daily life that have pushed the aesthetic and conceptual boundaries of the medium. Rejecting the technical precision of photography that had gripped the West in favor of a deconstructivist approach, Moriyama strips the picture down to its most essential elements to evoke the raw energy of urban life.
.
To call him prolific would be an understatement. Over the past half-century, Moriyama has had over 100 solo exhibitions and authored more than 150 books of his work, including the recent paperback, Daidō Moriyama: How I Take Photographs by Takeshi Nakamoto (Laurence King). Here, the man who allows his photographs to speak thousands, if not billions of words, shares the wisdom gleaned from the daily practice of street photography, which requires him to always be ready to shoot in rapid bursts.
.
“Whatever the genre of photography, all images are records of humanity, the world, and the time they were made, which is amazing,” Moriyama reveals in his only English-language interview for the book. “As long as we hold a powerful tool like the camera, we have nothing else to do but keep taking photographs.”
.
Read the Full Story at Document Journal
.
