Daido Moriyama
PhotographerKnown for: grainy high-contrast street photography of Tokyo; Farewell Photography (1972)
Daido Moriyama worked as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe in the early 1960s before developing a grainy, high-contrast, often blurred style of street photography that became one of the most influential photographic aesthetics of the late twentieth century. His 1972 book Farewell Photography — deliberately shaken, blurry, and radically underexposed — was a repudiation of photographic perfectionism that proved enormously influential. He has worked for decades with compact cameras, most recently the Ricoh GR, which he has discussed extensively in interviews as central to his practice.
Gear & Materials(2)
Ricoh
The Ricoh GR is a line of compact cameras with fixed wide-angle lenses produced continuously since 1996, most recently in APS-C digital sensor form. Its slim profile and near-silent leaf shutter made it a favored tool among photographers working in the street documentary tradition. Daido Moriyama adopted it as his primary camera and has discussed its role in his practice in multiple published interviews.
“Moriyama adopted the Ricoh GR compact camera as his primary tool and has discussed it extensively in interviews and published conversations; it is central to his accounts of his working method on the street.”
Kodak
In production since 1954, Tri-X 400 is a black-and-white film whose grain structure, broad exposure latitude, and response to push processing made it the dominant film in photojournalism and street photography for decades.
“Moriyama's high-contrast, grain-forward aesthetic was built on Tri-X pushed in development; he has discussed the film in interviews about his practice from the 1960s onward, and its grain is a deliberate formal element in his work.”
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