Daido Moriyama: Love Letters to Photography

For Daido Moriyama, photography is alive, very much alive. Since the early 1960s, he has maintained a daily, almost existential relationship with it. He addresses photography through images, books and writing, each time a declaration. In 1972, his book Shashin yo sayonara [Farewell Photography ] broke from the rules of “good” photography. At the same time, he published essays in Japanese photography magazines (Asahi Camera , Provoke , Shashin Jidai, etc.), each a kind of manifesto. He would also make repeated pilgrimages to sites associated with the very first photographer, Nicéphore Niépce. Many of his everyday images turn the medium back on itself—they hold up a mirror to it.

The exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is not a traditional retrospective organized around a chronological sequence of masterpieces. It is structured around a single, decisive premise: Moriyama’s obsession with photography itself.

Daido Moriyama, Stray Dog, Misawa, 1971 - Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein.