Daido Moriyama to the letter

Conference at 18:00 p.m. by Jean-Kenta GAUTHIER, a specialist in Japanese photography, sits on the selection committee for the galleries of Paris Photo and participates in the Paris Photo and Art Basel fairs.

“There’s no more effective way to hide a text than to include it in a photography book,” a friend who has written extensively on the medium confided in me. It’s true, and when those texts are in Japanese, it’s particularly effective. Which is a real shame, because Daido Moriyama’s texts offer magnificent reflections on what photography has offered the world for the past two centuries.

Author of over two hundred photography books, Daido Moriyama (born in Japan in 1938, where he still lives) has never claimed to be a writer; yet he has written countless texts. Published since the 1960s, most first appeared, often as serials, in photography magazines at a time when these were the primary, if not the only, destination for any Japanese photographer. Some were later collected in books of texts, such as the bestseller Memoirs of a Dog (1984), also translated into English, French, and Mandarin. Other texts appeared in newspapers as short pieces. Daido Moriyama is not a conceptual artist, but let's suppose that all art, upon reflection, is conceptual. His texts nourish a visual oeuvre that proves to be as accessible as it is demanding, as sensitive as it is intellectual.
Following on from the exhibition dedicated to this dimension of Daido Moriyama's work at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris from May 2026 (curator: Clément Chéroux, scientific advisor: Jean-Kenta Gauthier, with the support of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Tokyo), this conference proposes to reread the artist's work in light of his numerous texts.