Daido Moriyama was born in 1938 in Ikeda City, Osaka, Japan. Switching from designer to photographer, he worked as an assistant for Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe, before embarking on his career as a freelance photographer in 1964. For series such as “Japan: A Photo Theater,” which appeared in Camera Mainichi in 1967, he received the New Artist Award from the Japan Photo-Critics Association.
Large-scale exhibitions of Moriyama’s work have been held at a number of major institutions including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999; traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Japan Society, New York), the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011), and London’s Tate Modern (two person exhibition with William Klein 2012-13). In 2012, Moriyama received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography (New York), was ordered Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2018 by the French government, and he was also the winner of The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2019 which cemented his international reputation. Moriyama has also produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968.