Description: The diversity of moods, angles, and startling configurations which populate the images of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) are testament to thirty-five years at the forefront of his medium. As the catalog of Moriyama's retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this book provides a crucial overview of an artist whose pioneering work prefigures much current cutting-edge photography. Originally trained as a designer, Moriyama saw William Klein's book New York and a catalogue of photographs by Andy Warhol early in his career. From Klein and Warhol he learned to appreciate the harsh contrast and coarse half-tone effects of cheap publishing, raised to a positive aesthetic level. Other influences included writer Jack Kerouac, the inspiration for a seminal series of photos he took travelling the highways near Tokyo. He was also connected to dramatist Shuji Terayama, the Artaud of Japan, whose use of vaudevillian concepts parallels Moriyama's fascination with society's underworld.

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