Sea: Hachinohe City, 1990 - 2011

Among the most intense and original voices of contemporary Japanese photography, Daido Moriyama wanders the world with the spirit of a stray dog. The origins, as stated many times, of his real name Hiromici, which means ‘wide road’, already seem to contain a foretaste of his destiny: firstly travelling from one city to the next following his father, an employee in an insurance company, and then alone, his camera around his neck, driven by the urgency to capture the moment that passes before his eyes. The Japan in which he grew up was marked by transformations as sudden as they were profound: after WWII, the country was urbanised, consumption increased and the presence of American troops led to new cultural influences which began to undermine the strict values of tradition. [...]