1984

Untitled, from the series A Journey to Nakaji

Japanese, born 1938

In the series A Journey to Nakaji, as in Light and Shadow, Daido Moriyama pays homage to the work of another photographer, in this case Nakaji Yasui, a modern predecessor who worked in Moriyama's native city of Osaka, Japan, from the 1920s until his death in 1942. Yasui developed a style that favored snapshot-like photographs of mundane urban motifs and socially marginalized figures, as well as distant but eroticized pictures of women. In an appreciation of Yasui's work, Moriyama wrote, "One of photography's essential qualities is its amateurism; another is its anonymity."