Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Moriyama studied photography under Takeji Iwamiya, before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to work as an assistant to the photographer Eikoh Hosoe for three years. He produced a collection of photographs, Nippon gekijō shashinchō, which showed the darker sides of urban life and the less-seen parts of cities. In them, he attempted to show how life in certain areas was being left behind the other industrialized parts. His subsequent work revolves around the themes of urban mystery, memory, and exploration of the photographic medium. Moriyama's style is synonymous with that of Provoke magazine, which he was involved with in 1969, namely 'are, bure, bokeh', translated as 'grainy / rough, blurry, and out-of-focus'. Known mostly for his work inblack and white, his images often use high contrast and tilted horizons to convey the fragmentary nature of modern life. Moriyama often presents his work in the form of photo-books, which he describes as open-ended sites, allowing the reader to decide on the sequence of images that they view. Since 1968, he has published more than 150 photo books. Some of the most notable of these photo books are Japanese Theater, Farewell, Photography, Daidohysteric, and Hokkaido. Farewell, Photography is included in Andrew Roth's The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History, Volume I and the Hasselblad Center's The Open Book. While Moriyama has been working with color photography since the 1970s, they were seldom exhibited with the solo presentation Daido Tokyo at Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris, in 2016 being the first major solo show to display his color photographs. Between 2008 and 2015, Moriyama had revisited Tokyo, particularly focusing on the Shinjuku district, to take 86 chromogenic prints and black-and-white photographs. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in April 2016 secured a donation of street photography by Moriyama, the world's largest collection. Moriyama's photography has been influenced by Seiryū Inoue, Shōmei Tōmatsu, William Klein, Andy Warhol, Eikoh Hosoe, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, the dramatist Shūji Terayama and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Awards
1967: New Artist Award from the Japan Photo-Critics Association
Record No.6. – Record No.39. Tokyo: Akio Nagasawa, 2006–2018. Various individual editions.
Publications with others
4. Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero: shashin to gengo no shisō = First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty: Thoughts on Photography and Language. Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970.. With Nakahira Takuma, Takanashi Yutaka and Taki Kōji.
The Japanese Box – Facsimile reprint of six rare photographic publications of the Provoke era, Edition 7L / Göttingen: Steidl, 2001.
Terayama. Tokyo: Match and Company Co., 2015. English and Japanese editions. With text by Shuji Terayama and an afterword by Satoshi Machiguchi, "The Spell Moves On." Edition of 1500 copies.
Dazai. MMM label 5. Tokyo: Match and Company Co., 2014. With a text by Osamu Dazai, "Villon's Wife." Edition of 1200 copies.
Odasaku. Tokyo: Match and Company Co., 2016. With a short story by Sakunosuke Oda, "At the Horse Races," and an afterword by Satoshi Machiguchi.
Teppo yuri no Shateikyori. Tokyo: Getsuyosha, 2017. With haiku in Japanese by Misa Uchida.
