Moriyama is one of Japan's most famous photographers, so his work is well known there. However, his photos have only been shown outside of Japan sporadically and only in parts, so they haven't gotten the full praise they deserve.
Moriyama was born in 1938 in the port city of Osaka. At age 21, he became interested in photography and moved to Tokyo to work with the famous photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Moriyama became familiar with the work of both William Klein and Andy Warhol early in his career. He liked their new way of looking at things and changed it with his own ideas. Klein's emotional, even hostile pictures of his home city of New York gave Moriyama a sense of energy and modernity that pleased the young Japanese photographer. Warhol's work made Moriyama think of a voyeuristic media culture.
Moriyama takes his pictures on the streets of Japan's most important cities. They were taken quickly with a small camera that could be held in one hand. Often, the frame isn't straight on purpose, and the grain and contrast are made to stand out. Some of his city pictures were taken in dimly lit bars, strip clubs, on the street, or in an alleyway, where the movement of the subject blurred a clear figure into a vague suggestion of a shape.
The style of Moriyama was also part of this busy time in Japanese art. Today, much of the theatre, film, literature, art, and photography that came out of Japan seems radical because it was so different from what had come before. During the 1960s and 1970s, the American occupation and its mixed messages about democracy and control, peaceful coexistence, and the strong American presence in Asia during the Vietnam War had a big impact on Japanese art.
Moriyama and other radical artists wanted to break with the highly controlled Japanese society that had caused the war. They also wanted to show that Japan's pre-modern culture was still alive and well. So, the pictures Moriyama took of the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka, which show the freedom he saw there, and the stray dog near the U.S. Air Force base in Misawa show both how exciting and raw modern life is.
In the early 1980s, his work moved away from the vagueness and graininess of his earlier photos and toward a darker, clearer vision, which can be seen in the Light and Shadow series.
Moriyama pushes the limits of photography and looks into places that scare us because they are dark and fuzzy. Moriyama takes great, gritty black-and-white photos that look at Japanese culture after World War II.
Stray Dog, his most famous picture from 1971, was clearly taken on the run, in the middle of a busy, busy street. The alert, wandering, and alone animal that is still mysterious at the end is a powerful symbol of the vital outsider. It shows how Moriyama was an outsider in his own culture who was aware of what was going on.
