Stray Dog, Misawa, 1971

Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1938, Daido Moriyama is among the best known Japanese photographers. He embarked on his photography career in 1959 as a student of Takeji Iwamiya. However, his study under Iwamiya was brief and in 1961 he became the apprentice of one of the masters of Japanese photography, Eikoh Hosoe. Moriyama soon struck out on his own, creating a photographic style that disregarded the technical conventions of the day in favor of grainy, out-of-focus images taken with a small, hand-held camera. Described by Moriyama as "fossils of light and memory," his photographs avoided making the political statements that were so characteristic of the period, instead seeking to preserve instants of time in memory. In 1968, Moriyama worked for Provoke magazine and published his first book, Nippon Gekijo Shashin-cho (Japan: A Photo Theatre). He ran a photographic school throughout the 1970s and established the Workshop Photography School in conjunction with other photographers. Moriyama has won many awards and has had his work exhibited worldwide. His recent publications include Daido Moriyama 55 (Phaidon Press, 2002), Daido Moriyama: Actes Sud (Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 2003), Memories of a Dog (Nazraeli Press, 2004 and Osaka Plus (Getsuyosha, 2007).