1982

Untitled, from the series Light and Shadow

Japanese, born 1938

Daido Moriyama's series Light and Shadow is, in part, an extended meditation on the early experiments of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), a French inventor who made a small number of successful photographic images in the 1820s, well before photography's official invention in 1839. Niépce's pictures required long exposure, and one of his views famously traces the path of the sun across the sky over a period of eight hours, resulting in a highly abstracted pattern of light and shadow that underscores photography's status as a visual record of space and time-an essential aspect of the medium for Moriyama.