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Daido Moriyama
From Virtual Japan
Daido Moriyama (森山 大道) is a Japanese photographer. Born on October 10th, 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka. He moved to Tokyo in 1961 to work as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe.
His photography is most often black and white and tends to deal with the psychological aspects of emotion, often contrasted with violence and sex.
Artistic Style
Like Eikoh Hosoe, he won the Japan Photo Film Critics Association Award for new artists. Like Eikoh he attended the Tokyo Polytechnic Institute.
Most of his photography is black and white. His work tends to not be as focused on death as Eikoh’s was, nor is it as focused on sex, yet much of his work still has sexuality and emotions like fear. It is often described as “jolting” because it consists of a non-threatening image that appears to be threatening. One example of that is in a work known as “Stray Dog” where the dog’s face appears to be glaring dangerously. Another example is “The Three Views of Japan No. 3” which has a toddler with his hands in his pockets, glaring at the viewer of the image.
Other works are of Japan itself, such as “Tomei Expressway” which is of the Japan railway system. While other work focuses on sex, such as a number of different photographs he took of the legs of women in fishnet stockings where the photograph is such that the it takes a moment to realize that image is of legs that happen to be curled up in such a way that they take up the entire range of the photograph. Another is titled “Slip” which is of what appears to be a passed out woman, naked, with black area covering her genitals that looks to be in the shape of a thumb.
Recently, he has been a visiting professor at Tokyo Polytechnic University, a visiting professor at Kyoto University of Art & Design, and an advisor for Tokyo Visual Arts.