Quartet by Daido Moriyama

An anthology of the four seminal photobooks that form the foundation of Daido Moriyama's photographic career

Quartet explores Daido Moriyama’s early career through four foundational photobooks that highlight his place as one of Japan’s most radical photographers: Japan: A Photo Theater; A Hunter; Farewell Photography; and Light and Shadow.

Rooted in the complexities of Japan during a transformative era from 1968 to the early 1980s, these seminal photobooks not only offer profound insights into the nation’s evolving cultural, economic and social landscape, but also trace the emergence and development of Moriyama’s distinct style.

Mark Holborn – A Performance

Holborn places Daido Moriyama’s raw and restless images against Japan’s sweeping transformation—from postwar ruins to the neon streets of Shinjuku. He shows how Moriyama forged a “photography of performance,” capturing chaos, fleeting gestures, and fragments of memory in a society caught between tradition and modernity. This essay reads like a cultural history in motion, showing how Moriyama turned the street into his stage and his camera into a restless actor.

Daido Moriyama – Unexpected Encounters (1960s)

Moriyama reflects on his explosive debut, Japan: A Photo Theater. Through fragments of theatre, American military bases, and Tokyo’s underbelly, he reveals how his collaboration with poet Shuji Terayama unlocked a personal photographic language. These pages are less memoir than confession, tracing the urgency of a young artist who found his voice by dismantling reality and reassembling it into a new, unsettling vision of Japan.

Daido Moriyama – A Hunter

In this chapter, Moriyama recounts his restless years of wandering, camera in hand, turning highways, stray dogs, and industrial sprawl into a metaphor for modern Japan. His approach was less about documenting than “hunting” reality—shooting relentlessly, as if photography itself was survival. This text embodies the fierce independence that made A Hunter one of his most legendary works, a visual road novel echoing Jack Kerouac in Japanese streets.

Tadanori Yokoo – A Cowering Eye

Graphic designer and provocateur Yokoo offers an intimate, sometimes unsettling portrait of Moriyama. Struggling with the language of praise, he describes the photographer as both victim and assailant, detached yet frighteningly beautiful. For Yokoo, Moriyama’s pictures are like bad dreams—sexually charged, political in spite of themselves, and impossible to shake off. The essay bristles with tension and admiration, itself a mirror of Moriyama’s uneasy gaze.

Daido Moriyama – Farewell Photography

Here Moriyama recounts his most radical and nihilistic project—a book that tore apart the very medium of photography. Scratched negatives, sprockets, and found images collapse into a torrent of chaos, rejecting clarity and narrative. This is the voice of an artist who had lost faith in images, society, even himself, but who dared to turn that despair into one of the most daring photo-books ever made.

Daido Moriyama – Unexpected Encounters (1972–82): Towards Light and Shadow

This essay is Moriyama’s reckoning with a turbulent decade of addiction, disillusionment, and slow renewal. Between workshops, failed projects, and deep personal struggles, he clawed his way back to clarity with Light and Shadow (1982)—a book that distilled his style into pure contrast and form. It reads as a testimony to survival, showing how even in darkness, fragments of light can redefine an artist’s path.