Daido Moriyama

Photo Elysée is presenting a major exhibition devoted to one of Japan’s greatest photographers. This retrospective, produced by the Instituto Moreira Salles (Sao Paulo, Brazil), will be making a stopover in Switzerland after showing in Berlin and London. 

During the sixty years of his career, Daido Moriyama (born in Osaka in 1938) definitively altered our perception of photography. He used his camera to document his immediate surroundings and to visually explore post-war society in Japan. But he also challenged the very nature of photography itself.  

His incomparable visual language is as highly acclaimed as his numerous publications, which are at the heart of his work. 

Right from the start, viewers have been captivated by Moriyama’s photographic subjects, from the mass media and advertising to society's taboos and the theatricality of everyday life. He captured the clash between Japanese tradition and the accelerated westernisation that followed the US military occupation of Japan after the end of the Second World War. Inspired by American artists such as Andy Warhol and William Klein, the photographer brought Japan's nascent consumer society to life. He explored the reproducibility of images, their dissemination and their consumption. Moriyama repeatedly positioned his archive of images in new contexts, playing with enlargements, cropping and image resolution. Even today, his pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain innovative.