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Spotlight on Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama is one of those photographers who have made work for a long time now, he is a legend for his style of photography. If you like gritty grainy Black and White imagery that is made with lo-fi cameras, then you should be aware of his work.

He loves high contrast and he is totally not adverse to grain, blown highlights or other things, that someone like Ansel Adams would have hated. His technique, is not about the perfect image. It is about what he saw and noticed, then cares to show you. This for me, is his power, as he is not a photographer who is adverse to breaking a few boundaries off ‘good’ photography.

Lets talk image qualities

Diado is one of these photographers who has embraced the low fi way of working, not for him big honking professional cameras, He is known for using small cheap compact cameras either digital or before with film. Cameras that did not give a lot of control over how the image was made. Then matched with using Black and White film or more recently digital, printed with really deep blacks in most of his images. He is not adverse to Grain (or digital noise) and great chucks of it, which gives his images that gritty quality.

I love how he frames his complex images and uses his exposure the create silhouettes.

Or uses printing techniques to render the image the way he wants it to be seen.

Working Methods

Advice from “How I Take Photographs”

Well the first thing I always tell anyone who asks me of advice is: Get Outside. It’s all about getting out and walking. … The second thing is, forget everything you’re learned about ht subject of photography for the moment and just shoot. Take photographs – of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don’t pause to think. That’s the advice I give people” ¹

“If you go to places with an agenda related to what’s going on socially or politically, and try to take shots that underpin that agenda, you’re not going to get anywhere. The photographer should just shoot whatever he observes, using all his sense, and if possible unselectively. This is what I always tell my students, or any young person who wants to become a photographer.” ²

“Whenever I photograph shopping streets. I make it a rule to walk the street twice – I go up the street, then back down again. The light will always fall in a particular way when you go up the street, and then the opposite way when you’re going in the other direction, so different things will present themselves to you. Something that seemed quite worthless when seen against the light might seem absolutely fascinating when the light falls on it from the front.”³

Daido Moriyama’s Photographic output,

Is extensive, he was born in 1938 and started to work as a photographer in 1964 and has been exhibiting his work since 1968 onwards, with numerous book, gallery exhibitions and awards. He is notorious for using lots of film and now with digital making even more frames than before.

Links to Daido Moriyama’s work

Daido Moryiama’s website is available here, to see how he wants to show you his work. fortunately for us English speakers once you find the English button on the website, you can navigate and read the site, however if you don’t, it will be in Japanese and a bit of guesswork to navigate.

Digital Camera World posted this article, on Daido Moriyama which gave me the push to write this article.