Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama is considered one of the leading figures of Japanese Photography today. Trained as a graphic designer, he began to work as a freelance industrial designer in 1958. In the course of his work, he visited the photo studios of Takeji Iwamiya and became so fascinated with the world of photography that he decided to give up design and serve as an apprentice in the studio.

In 1961, he moved to Tokyo and got a job working as the assistant of Eikoh Hosoe, the first internationally recognized photographer of his generation in Japan. Moriyama found himself to be most profoundly influenced by Japanese photographers Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe. Like Tomatsu, Moriyama was fascinated by the bizarre underworld of Japanese street life and trough his collaboration with Hosoe, he drew a sense of the theatrical and the erotic.