Daido Moriyama, Nude, Setagay-ku, Tokyo, circa 1986

Daido  Moriyama, Nude, Setagay-ku, Tokyo, circa 1986

Gelatin silver print, 10 x 12 inches, 25.4 x 30.48 cm. Signed. Estimate: from $6,000 to $9,000

Note: Nude, Setagay-ku, Tokyo, 1986, appears in his book 'Lettre à Saint Loup', published by Kawade Shoba Shinsha, Publisher, Japan, 1990, 2005. The book is named for the town of Nicéphore Niépce.

One of the most important and accomplished Japanese photographers of the postwar era, Moriyama infuses his images with a modern aesthetic sensibility that conflates Asian and Western artistic traditions. Early in his career, he was profoundly influenced by William Klein's book, Life Is Good and Good For You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956), and his photographs from that period share the grainy, distressed appearance of Klein's photographs. Klein's brash, confrontational style mimicked the hostility of America's postwar urban environment; in Moriyama's work, the same audacity echoes the often incongruous and psychologically jarring juxtaposition in postnuclear Japan of Asian tradition with American influence, and, more recently, with the homogenizing power of contemporary industrial civilization.[metmuseum]

Daidō Moriyama (森山大道, Moriyama Daidō?) (born October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer noted for his images depicting the breakdown of traditional values in post-war Japan. Born in Ikeda, Osaka, he studied photography under Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to work as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. He produced a collection of photographs, Nippon gekijō shashinchō, which showed the darker sides of urban life and the less-seen parts of cities. In them, he attempted to show how life in certain areas was being left behind the other industrialised parts. His work was often stark and contrasting within itself. One image could convey an array of senses; all without using color. His work was jarring, yet symbiotic to his own fervent lifestyle. Among the most famous of Moriyama's works is the 1971 shot of a stray dog (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and many others featuring everyday objects or landscapes shot from unfamiliar angles, giving them a stark perspective.[wiki] 

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