Daido Moriyama – Love Letters to Photography

Exhibition from May 20 to October 4, 2026 at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation79 rue des Archives, 75003 PARIS

For Daido Moriyama, photography is alive, very much alive. Since the early 1960s, that is, since he began to maintain a daily, almost existential relationship with this sensitive form of recording the world, he has constantly addressed it through projects, images, and texts that each time carry the weight of a declaration. In 1972, his book Shasin yo sayonara [Goodbye Photography] deconstructs the accepted rules of good photographic practice. At the same time, he regularly published in the Japanese specialized press (Asahi Camera, Provoke, Shashin Jidai ...etc.) photographic essays that are essentially manifestos. He also undertook numerous photographic pilgrimages in the footsteps of the very first photographer, the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce. Many of his images, taken day by day, also constitute forms of mise en abyme of the medium. They hold up a mirror to it. The exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation is not a traditional retrospective with its chronologically arranged succession of masterpieces. It is based on a strong curatorial approach, proposing to follow the central thread of Moriyama's obsession with photography itself.