#DaidoMoriyamaADiary07

“Something suddenly occurred to me. This was the fact that I had spent my life using a camera to create a photographic city, a photographic map… in a way it resembles a jigsaw puzzle, but unlike jigsaw puzzle there is no limit to the number of pieces it contains and no matter how many photographs I may take it will never be complete.”

Most of all, Moriyama takes his inspiration from street life- day and night- and the endlessly heterogeneous blend of individuals moving about in the city. His work is driven by a constant movement, curiosity and appetite, and one might say that he photographs with the stomach.

(Sara Walker y Louise Wolthers. ‘Daido Moriyama. A Diary - Hasselblad Award 2019, Hasselblad Foundation / Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2020’)

“I have always felt that the world is an erotic place... For me cities are enormous bodies of people’s desires. And as I search for my own desires within them, I slice into time, seeing the moment. That’s the kind of camera work I like.”

“It may look like I’m just pointing the camera at what’s in front of me. But I’m trying to photograph what people see, but don’t notice – something that’s mysterious and unknown in everyday life.”

In 2015 Daido Moriyama writes: “I was constructing a personal Shangri-La, a city that is conformed to my natural disposition, desires and imagination… not a beautiful city of dreams… but rather a mundane world, overflowing with a confusing interaction of people and things.”

“I have no option but to continue to photograph on a daily basis, adding as many pieces as possible to this unfinished, virtual city.”

“In the end I realised that crowded streets are the only place I can work as a photographer.”