Daido Moriyama

Moriyama began his career in the mid-1960s documenting the seedy streets of the Shinjuku district in Tokyo. His personal style of are, bure, boke (“grainy, blurry, out-of-focus”) lends a sense of rawness and immediacy to the cast of provocative characters and objects that dominate his photographs. Since the 1960s, his work has received international recognition, as well as numerous awards, including this year’s Lifetime Achievement award from the International Center of Photography in New York. 

This year, Moriyama’s photographs were featured in several exhibitions across the globe. “Fracture” (4/7–7/31), held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, included the artist’s iconic black-and-white photographs, as well as an installation of new and recent color works. His color photographs were also included in “Candid” (4/5–6/2) at Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles, and were the focus of “Color” (5/11–6/9) at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, which exhibited photographs selected from the approximately 30,000 digital images that Moriyama has shot of Tokyo between 2008 and 2012.

“William Klein + Daido Moriyama” (10/10–1/20/13), held at London’s Tate Modern, compared the two artists’ approach to photography and their shared interest in street life. Elsewhere in London, “Tights and Lips” (9/7–10/27), at Michael Hoppen Gallery, displayed Moriyama’s new series of black-and-white photographs of a woman’s legs in fishnet tights. Also in September, Paris’ Polka Galerie kicked off a three-part exhibition series entitled “The Daido Moriyama Cycle.” The first segment, “Hokkaido-Northern” (9/13–11/6), included photographs taken during his many trips to the Hokkaido prefecture of Japan. “Paris” (11/14–22) displayed 30 never-before-shown photographs, taken during the years Moriyama lived in Paris in the late 1980s. Rounding out the year was the final installment, entitled “Sérigraphies” (11/14–1/12/13), which featured 20 large-scale silkscreens created exclusively for the show.