# HOW I LEARN - Daido Moriyama

> Photography does not have to surpass the past every time. By continuing to press the shutter, the body and its emotions can turn ordinary life into evidence of survival—and lead us back from self-doubt into living.

- Language: en
- Published: 2023-08-24
- Author: GuoJing
- Category: HOWILEARN
- Canonical: https://afterimage.photography/post/en/how-i-learn-from-daido-moriyama

What finally helped me understand Daido Moriyama was not his style of grain, blur, and defocus, but the modest way of living behind *Record*: we do not have to surpass our past every time. We only have to keep photographing and let emotion and the body reach the image before meaning does.

Recently, I bought another issue of Daido Moriyama’s *Record*.

Whenever I bought one in the past, I thought it contained little more than everyday black-and-white photographs. Yet when I photographed daily life myself, I kept asking, “Why would Moriyama photograph it this way?” Without realizing it, I had undeniably absorbed a great deal from him. I am reluctant to admit it for personal reasons—especially because some people think Bruce Gilden influenced me more—but perhaps it is impossible to be a black-and-white photographer without being influenced by Moriyama.

My period of supposedly “giving up photography” and “not picking up a camera” lasted perhaps six months to a year. Recently, I began recording daily life again and suddenly caught a trace of Moriyama. *All right, it seems there is no escaping him.* When I was younger, I thought I was untouched by any master and needed only to photograph what I saw and heard. So what if the styles converged? After several years, I have become humbler. There is still much to learn from the masters. Everyone is arrogant when young. I do not think my photographs imitate Moriyama completely, but neither can I claim that no trace of him is present.

![A black-and-white street image reminiscent of Moriyama](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/01-opening-street-photo-7825d0cb257a.jpg)

I am writing HOW I LEARN - Daido Moriyama because I recently began to feel differently about *Record*. Many people probably share my old reaction: “I know Moriyama’s earlier work and seem to have settled my opinion of it,” “I cannot understand the recent *Record*,” and “Now that the atmosphere of Japanese political activism is gone, what exactly is Moriyama photographing?” I held that attitude for two or three years, wanting and not wanting to buy the books. I finally decided to do so because I suddenly felt that I understood *Record* and saw it anew.

## 01 - Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama, born October 10, 1938, is a Japanese photographer known for black-and-white street photography and his association with the avant-garde magazine *Provoke*.

He began as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a founder of the avant-garde cooperative VIVO, and gained recognition with his first photobook, *Japan: A Photo Theater* (1968). His formative work of the 1960s captured the underside of postwar Japanese urban life in a vivid, uninhibited manner. Steep angles, grain, high contrast, and blurred movement within a wandering gaze conveyed the roughness of human experience. Much of his best-known work from the 1960s and 1970s can be read through postwar reconstruction and the cultural turbulence following the occupation.

![Portrait of Daido Moriyama](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/02-moriyama-portrait-65f24d23a069.jpg)

In the 1969 *Accident* series, serialized for a year in *Asahi Camera*, Moriyama continued testing the camera’s expressive possibilities, using it as a copying machine to reproduce existing media images. His 1972 photobook *Farewell Photography*, accompanied by a conversation with fellow *Provoke* photographer Takuma Nakahira, demonstrated a radical attempt to dismantle the medium.

Although photobooks are a popular form among Japanese photographers, Moriyama has been especially prolific, publishing more than 150 since 1968. Major institutions have honored him with solo exhibitions, along with a two-person exhibition with William Klein at Tate Modern in 2012–13. His awards include the 2019 Hasselblad Award and the International Center of Photography’s 2012 Infinity Award.

![Street photography by Daido Moriyama](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/03-moriyama-street-work-e2ecfd2c49e4.jpg)

Born Hiromichi Moriyama in Ikeda, Osaka, he moved frequently because of his father’s work, spending parts of childhood in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Chiba, and Shimane, his paternal family’s home, before returning to Osaka at about eleven.

He worked in graphic design from sixteen to twenty, then bought an inexpensive Canon IV Sb from a friend in his twenties and began photographing. He worked in Takeji Iwamiya’s Osaka studio before moving to Tokyo in 1961 and contacting the avant-garde photographic circle he admired. He eventually became Hosoe’s assistant and credited him with teaching many fundamentals of photographic practice and technique.

Yet during three years with Hosoe, Moriyama made no photographs of his own until Hosoe impatiently urged him to show some work.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Moriyama witnessed political turmoil—most vividly the 1960 Anpo protests—economic revival, mass consumption, and the radical art unique to the two decades after the war. *Japan: A Photo Theater* (1968) captured the excitement, tension, anxiety, and anger of that historical moment through a dizzying full-page sequence. Ordinary streets, blurred faces, bright signs, Tokyo’s aggressive rebuilding and lingering ruins, nightlife, and the city’s darker elements all appeared. As its title suggests, the book focused on the theater of daily life, ugly or magnificent.

![An urban street scene in postwar Japan](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/04-postwar-japan-street-8ef530523f73.jpg)

## 02 - Major Works

***These are Moriyama’s older works. Readers already familiar with them may skip this section.***

### A - *Provoke*

In 1965, Moriyama published “Silent Theater,” photographs of preserved human embryos, in *Gendai no Me*. They attracted avant-garde poet Shūji Terayama, who commissioned illustrations for experimental theater and essays, helping Moriyama’s early career and connecting him with figures including Tadanori Yokoo and Takuma Nakahira. His relationship with Nakahira, a founder of *Provoke*, led to his participation from 1969.

Founded in 1968 by photographers Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi, critic Kōji Taki, and poet Takahiko Okada, the short-lived but influential magazine championed the *are-bure-boke* style—rough, blurred, and out of focus. It responded to European-style photojournalism then dominant in Japan, exemplified by Ken Domon’s realism, and straightforward commercial work. Its everyday visions refused photography as a clear mirror of the world supported by a legible ideological argument. Instead, they emphasized fragmented reality and the photographer’s wandering gaze.

![*Eros* from Moriyama’s *Provoke* period](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/05-provoke-eros-093d798c4dee.jpg)

Eroticism and masculine subjectivity are often associated with Moriyama’s contributions. *Eros* (1969), in the second issue, shows a nude woman smoking on a bed in a tilted, grainy image, suggesting the aftermath of an encounter. Her back faces the viewer and deep shadows surround her, lending the camera’s gaze a secretive, ominous atmosphere.

The magazine’s 1968 manifesto stated that images are not ideas: they lack conceptual totality and the communicative code of language. Yet their irreversible materiality—a reality severed from the camera—forms the reverse of the world defined by language and can provoke the realm of words and thought. *Provoke* affirmed photography’s power to create phenomenological encounters through embodiment and immediacy, moving beyond assumptions about truth, reality, and vision to question the material identity of photography and the roles of photographer, subject, and viewer. The group published only three issues and the 1970 book *First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty: Thoughts on Photography and Language*, but its cultural influence was enormous and later became the subject of many international exhibitions.

> Gasoline-stained streets of Shinjuku, telephone booths reflecting cold light, girls floating like spirits in underground passages, the canopy of a dump truck half dissolved into darkness—in Nakahira’s “Nights in the City,” first published in *Provoke* and later collected in *For a Language to Come*, objective description and poetry struggle with each other, producing an attraction powerful enough to be called erotic.
>
> Against photography lacking political self-awareness and founded on “social justice” and “objective truth,” Nakahira answered with “an immediate record of the self situated in the world.” He questioned self-satisfied “expression” and “communication” and declared that his documentary began by confronting the urgent reality directed at himself, not anyone else, within a self-directed existence above all else.

### B - *Accident*

![Moriyama’s *Accident* series](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/06-accident-series-92871344d812.jpg)

In 1968, Moriyama began works about “equivalence,” using mass-media images as material. The series arose after he saw news of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination across the front pages of newspapers scattered around a Tokyo station. Shocked and fascinated by the mediation of news imagery, he told Nakahira that the encounter made him resolve “to negate the values attached to a single photograph.”

He rephotographed a television image of Lyndon B. Johnson announcing a halt to bombing North Vietnam, a press photograph of Richard Nixon after his electoral victory, the body of a murdered Viet Cong soldier, and the Kennedy image. Treating the camera as a device that copied reality and produced “equivalents” made the distance among the original photograph, endlessly reproduced news images, his own version, and the initial event almost negligible. Published in twelve parts with his writing in *Asahi Camera*, the series addressed fate’s unpredictability and human fragility. Moriyama believed the camera could reveal that “the possibility of tragedy had already permeated the surrounding environment.”

> What I call a record is first an immediate record of every moment I am alive. Under that limitation it is autistic, beginning from a severance of attachment to the self. Yet I cannot be free from history; I am “situated” in the proper sense of the word. An autistic record is inevitably socialized, and its direct reflection must extend into history and politics. No—precisely because it brings a situation to the surface, it must first be recorded.

### C - *Farewell Photography*

![*Farewell Photography*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/07-farewell-photography-171e874894ff.jpg)

Published in April 1972, *Farewell Photography* emerged amid Japan’s vigorous cultural and economic revival—epitomized by Expo ’70 in Osaka—and continued suppression of the left, evident in the failed 1970 Anpo protests and renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty.

As the title suggests, the book shifted attention from visual subjects toward photography’s contingency and generative force. The images emphasize physical residues: discarded film edges, dust, light leaks, sprocket holes, and brand names. These material dimensions challenge the indexical relationship among photographer, camera, and image, and the convention of treating a photograph as a direct reference to reality.

![Film edges in *Farewell Photography*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/08-farewell-film-frame-13d77a126afa.jpg)

![Light leaks and grain in *Farewell Photography*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/09-farewell-light-leak-c13bb8cc799d.jpg)

![The material trace of film in *Farewell Photography*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/10-farewell-film-strip-4e80968dec8f.jpg)

## 03 - *Record*

*Record* is Moriyama’s work of the present, and we can still buy its latest issues. I bought numbers 43 and 51; after seeing preview pages I liked, I decided immediately.

> In 2006, Akio Nagasawa, head of the publisher that had long worked with Moriyama, chatted with him in a Shinjuku café. “Would you continue *Record*?” Nagasawa suddenly asked. “*Record*…that *Record*?” Moriyama replied in surprise.
>
> “Yes, that *Record*,” Nagasawa said.
>
> The question pulled Moriyama into memories from thirty-four years earlier. In 1972, at thirty-four, he had already earned a reputation in Japanese photography. That year he released the radical, shocking *Farewell Photography*, which shook the field. Yet the exceptional work also raised a wall he could not cross, the predictable disorientation after a peak.
>
> Meanwhile, magazine assignments filled his life. Photographing became routine, and his feelings toward photography grew restless.

Even people deeply familiar with Moriyama’s past struggle to express their own response to *Record*. **This is a loss of language, revealing that they never truly understood his style.** I never consciously imitated him, yet gradually photographed in a similar way, passing through a process of “the mountain is no longer a mountain” until “the mountain is a mountain again.” When I made my *Deep* series, I barely knew Moriyama. In late-night alleys after overtime, I simply released anger, helplessness, and confusion. Mistakes in film development added blur, overexposure, and grain. Friends said, “This looks very Moriyama,” and only then did I realize someone had long photographed this way.

![The author’s *Deep* series, one](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/11-deep-series-one-d1eb6dd19847.jpg)

![The author’s *Deep* series, two](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/12-deep-series-two-7924e9af5c74.jpg)

*The two photographs above are from my own *Deep* series.*

The look of *Deep* was pure coincidence and hardly a style. Even if I tried today, I could not recreate that unforced roughness.

When I began studying Moriyama, I still did not understand him; I only felt the emotion superficially. I liked some of it and kept following the work.

![An image from Moriyama’s *Record*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/13-record-series-photo-d022b601d3e7.jpg)

Later, while photographing my life, I encountered the idea of “personal photography” and bought *On Personal Photography*. Its discussion of Moriyama’s methods and context deepened my understanding of “blur,” “chaos,” and “the instinctive response of the body.” Their meaning cannot be copied. The technique can be imitated, but the interior is almost impossible to reproduce because the style belongs to a historical moment.

> Unconstrained by professional ethics or a consciousness of expression, he continually tried to capture the world intuitively. The flesh—the naked condition of the body—was the origin of this photographic act. He sought an “immediate record” through the tactile bodily sense of the “individual”; photographs of “coarse grain and shake” were the inevitable product of that desire.

Whenever I reached a plateau, I bought photobooks compulsively, including Moriyama’s. That was how I learned he was still photographing and had continued *Record* for decades.

It was not easy to look at. At first, I only flipped through and thought the pictures were “nothing special,” somehow worse than the old Moriyama—perhaps my pride was involved. I shelved the book and bought no more, thinking, “The world changes while the style does not. Perhaps an artist cannot innovate forever.” Now I know I had not understood Moriyama or *Record* deeply enough.

> When pressing the shutter, he listened inwardly and confronted himself, but had no platform for the photographs and felt powerless. Two years earlier, *Provoke* had released his passion. He alone opposed its suspension, but could not prevent the dissolution. His radical commitment remained, yet he lost its stage.
>
> He decided to self-publish booklets connecting experience and image. They contained no manifesto, only sixteen pages each, no fixed subject—simply favorite works, designed and edited himself, with the plain title *Record*.
>
> Issue 1 appeared in July 1972, and Kazuo Nishii was later invited to contribute text. The form preserved creative freedom and countered the pressure of reality. Yet after one year it stopped again. Issue 5 coincided with the global oil crisis, tripling printing costs beyond what Moriyama could afford. Only five appeared, but as the name suggests, these brief histories recording a life were not meaningless.
>
> Decades later, Moriyama had crossed that low point and become internationally prominent. Encouraged by Nagasawa, he revived the project with Issue 6 in 2006. It became a regular publication, two to four issues per year, without a rigid schedule, simply gathering accumulated photographs. He never tired of it.
>
> “Every issue is evidence that I have survived, and every one matters. *Record* is a necessity, like electricity, water, and gas. Because *Record* exists, I can face each day with energy.”

## 04 - “Presentness” and Misreading

![The contemporary street in *Record*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/14-contemporary-record-61859d3ce51e.jpg)

We have established language for the earlier Moriyama: “the political season,” “the body’s instinctive response,” and opposition to photography grounded in “social justice” and “objective truth” without political awareness. With today’s *Record*, we seem unable to speak. It can look like books of meaningless pictures because there is no political season, no need for instinctive reaction, and no photography “in the name of justice” to oppose. Criticism loses change, sharpness, a viewpoint, and a direction. Applying old definitions to current work naturally reaches a dead end.

Without grand art history or theory, many of the photographs are indeed simple and can appear aesthetically weak to viewers unfamiliar with photography. Most possess strong beauty, but seeing it takes practice; to ordinary eyes they may look like meaningless snapshots. That impression is stronger in *Record*. These readily available moments happen around us constantly, and a “Moriyama style” does not automatically confer higher artistic value or extend the boundary of his art.

So if you like Moriyama’s old photographs but cannot understand *Record*, I think that is entirely normal.

Perhaps *Record* loses distance precisely because of its presentness, a philosophical and psychological idea emphasizing experience and existence in the current moment—our sensations, thoughts, perceptions, and interaction with our environment rather than past or future. We are absorbed in the present, and Moriyama’s photographs are also made “now.” Looking at *Record*, including its images of the pandemic in Japan, we inhabit that moment. Its period and stories connect directly to us, and that link removes unfamiliarity and distance.

![A pandemic-era image from *Record*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/15-pandemic-era-record-cf44733fb78e.jpg)

People often approach “works of art” with reverence, and excessive closeness can destroy the term. If you live in a Beijing hutong while artists photograph, construct, and stage work there, you probably will not find it interesting art. You may resent the noise and disorder. To a reader in America, however, combining contemporary art with a Beijing hutong may sound very cool.

This presentness leaves Moriyama’s admirers speechless. We cannot apply the old *Provoke* again or find “content” with which to stylize and label the artist.

## 05 - What I Learned from the Master

### A - It Is Enough to Record

![An ordinary street moment in *Record*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/16-record-street-moment-0ff1d554d67c.jpg)

In current language, I became photographically impotent this year. I did not want to pick up a camera; when I did, I had no idea what to shoot. A voice kept saying, “Today must be better than the past,” and “If it cannot be better, do not shoot.” I had won a few small awards. Under the pressure not to repeat myself and a powerful self-rejection, everything I made looked like trash. Many pictures were actually decent, but denial made them unacceptable. Long-term harshness toward myself directly destroyed my enthusiasm.

***Picking up the camera was no longer a joy, but a responsibility.***

So I stopped photographing for a year.

Gear obsession also played a part. I encountered Moriyama’s work again and remembered that he used Nikon AX900 and AX1000 cameras—though it hardly mattered because he used whatever someone lent him. I thought I might buy a similar camera and shoot casually, so I bought an AX1000 and happily returned to compact cameras and phones. I admit I still chose some gear: I bought a Sony RX100 VII because it focuses quickly, or so I reassured myself.

![A compact camera used for casual recording](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/17-compact-camera-28d89a2ab18d.jpg)

New cameras changed my attitude. I stopped worrying about wide-angle distortion, poor telephoto quality, or shake. If I could capture something, I tried. I told myself not to think about growth, competitions, meaning, or expectations. I could photograph freely, even if the result was trash. Whatever the subject, it was enough to photograph what I wanted.

***At that point, I suddenly understood Daido Moriyama.***

![The author’s everyday photograph, one](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/18-daily-photo-one-ea94ed571b99.jpg)

![The author’s everyday photograph, two](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/19-daily-photo-two-08dc1a89a2ab.jpg)

![The author’s everyday photograph, three](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/20-daily-photo-three-e1fcd9dfa5a9.jpg)

![The author’s everyday photograph, four](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/21-daily-photo-four-18702658e616.jpg)

![The author’s everyday photograph, five](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/22-daily-photo-five-4b5f9c963d15.jpg)

(Perhaps it has been a long time since you saw me share my own photographs.)

I took these casually while eating, with cameras and phones, without caring about noise or exposure. Instinct told me to record, so I did. At home, I found some were surprisingly good, and suddenly understood the meaning of *Record*.

> He listened inwardly and confronted himself as he pressed the shutter, but had no platform and felt powerless. Only Moriyama opposed ending *Provoke*, yet he could not stop its dissolution. His radical attitude remained, but its stage disappeared.
>
> Decades later, Moriyama crossed that low point and became a photographer of international prominence.

Moriyama also had peaks and lows. In the low period, *Record* was his self-rescue. It also helped pull me out of the mud.

### B - Emotion Matters More Than Content

As I said, I imposed higher and more unreasonable demands on myself. Growth cannot happen instantly, so I moved from my supposed peak into a pit I had designed. Every session made me want to slap myself: “How can you be so stupid?” “You cannot make good pictures anymore!” I envied other people’s enthusiasm and accused myself: “You have even lost your passion!”

***You are finished!***

Perhaps *Record* made my fingers itch. I began photographing anything in my life: my wife, our dog, traffic lights on the commute. I thought about neither focal length, ISO, shutter, nor aperture. Everything went to “AUTO,” and everything went to **chance**.

Work and life were oppressive, with nowhere to release it; I did not even have habits like smoking or drinking. Beijing was rainy that year, dark clouds arriving each afternoon and making it hard to breathe. In spare moments, all I could do was photograph at random. Gradually I felt better, as though cutting distress into slices of time, sending them elsewhere, and sealing them away. A photograph became a folded emotion and an exploding complaint. As I kept shooting, the complaints exploded themselves empty and the emotions folded away, leaving me clear.

Insignificant, unrestricted photography is a temporal archive of self and existence, and a slice of emotion from the soul.

![A casual photograph as an emotional archive, one](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/23-emotional-archive-one-18dd23dbb94c.jpg)

![A casual photograph as an emotional archive, two](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/24-emotional-archive-two-9c510b41792d.jpg)

At this point, I could finally say I completely understood *Record*. I immediately ordered the latest issue and looked forward to the pictures. Simply seeing them would be enough.

![An image from a *Record* photobook, one](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/25-record-book-one-02aaa1a73d7f.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, two](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/26-record-book-two-1b93d61dad45.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, three](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/27-record-book-three-887738de0316.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, four](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/28-record-book-four-f5466cb66df1.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, five](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/29-record-book-five-b86fcda33ae9.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, six](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/30-record-book-six-7ec633636bfb.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, seven](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/31-record-book-seven-b7b7bc55e0ac.jpg)

![An image from a *Record* photobook, eight](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/32-record-book-eight-cbee2359bb7b.jpg)

Even if viewers do not know the particular emotion being expressed, they cannot deny the emotional tension rushing out of the frame—a force impossible to avoid or shake off.

Well, a master is still a master.

## 06 - Summary

1. Photograph casually. Just photograph, and keep photographing.
2. Put the goal first. Do not obsess over focal length, image quality, aperture, shutter, or ISO. If you capture what you want, you have succeeded; crop freely if the goal requires it.
3. Invest emotion. Photograph through instinct and trust the force of your body and inner desire.
4. Maintain a style. Moriyama’s decades of commitment became a new style and gave all his work a shared language.
5. Make photobooks. Keep photographing and keep publishing.

## 07 - Further Resources

1. Wikipedia
2. *On Personal Photography*
3. *A Conversation Between Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira*

[Video about Daido Moriyama 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foWAs3V_lkg)

[Video about Daido Moriyama 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxGmcEFtvDA)