I still remember the first time I encountered Daido Moriyama’s work in a Tokyo bookshop. Where the bookshop was exactly had skipped my mind – maybe Tsutaya in Daikanyama or a cramped bookshop somewhere around Shinjuku or Shibuya. 

It was 2012, and I was a web designer living in Japan, hunting through photography monographs written entirely in Japanese. The book was called “写真のフクシュウ 森山大道の言葉” (roughly translated to “Photography’s Revival – Words of Moriyama Daido”), and opening it felt like being struck.

The images were all in black and white. They were stark, some of which I could not decipher the subject matter. Upon first glance, they looked like they were processed extensively to maximise the contrast and exposure to the point of distortion. They looked almost like perversion elevated into some kind of an art form, with a certain note of serious journalism.

Moriyama’s images—grainy, blurred, violently contrasted—seemed to vibrate with an energy I recognised from walking Tokyo’s streets at night, but in black and white: the neon bleeding into puddles, the compression of bodies in train carriages, the dystopian signages stacked up on thin high buildings in Kabukicho. The collective images were like a visual stutter between centuries.

But it was more than aesthetic, I knew it, instinctively. Something deeper hummed beneath, wounded and unresolved.

What I didn’t fully understand then, but have come to recognise now, is that Moriyama wasn’t simply photographing post-war Japan. He was excavating its psychological architecture: the nation’s collective trauma through images that were intentionally out of focus, and dissolved into abstraction.

And that leads us to our next discussion.

THE SHATTERED LENS: ARE, BURE, BOKE　(粗, 暈, ぼけ)

The Japanese term for Moriyama’s signature style—are, bure, boke—translates roughly as “rough, blurred, out-of-focus.” It sounds dismissive, almost derogatory, like a technical failure. And that’s precisely the point.

In a culture that values precision, cleanliness, and order, Moriyama’s photographs were acts of visual vandalism. They rejected the glossy commercial photography saturating post-war Japan and the seemingly objective photojournalism imported from Europe. Instead, they offered something far more unsettling: honesty rendered as chaos.

When Moriyama joined the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke in 1968 for its second issue, he entered a collective determined to create what they called “provocative materials for thought.” The magazine lasted only three issues—November 1968 to August 1969—but its impact reverberated through Japanese photography for decades. Provoke’s manifesto declared that photographers must capture “fragments of reality that can no longer be grasped through existing language.” Language had failed. Words had failed. What remained was the image—but not the pristine, composed image. The broken one. The one that looked like it had been dragged through the rubble of reconstruction.

It was a philosophical and psychological necessity.

THE WEIGHT OF THE UNSPOKEN

To understand Moriyama’s work, you must understand the peculiar psychology of post-war Japan—a nation that experienced atomic annihilation, military defeat, foreign occupation, and forced democratisation within the span of a few years, then was told to rebuild, modernise, and forget.

The trauma was national, collective, and profoundly repressed.

Research into Japan’s post-war psychological landscape reveals a disturbing pattern: for nearly 50 years after the war’s end, the country conducted virtually no research into post-traumatic stress disorder, despite experiencing the world’s only atomic bombings, devastating firebombings, and widespread civilian trauma.

It wasn’t until 1995—after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Tokyo subway Sarin gas attack—that PTSD even entered public consciousness in Japan.

This wasn’t ignorance. It was organised forgetting.

The post-war government, in collaboration with American occupying forces, constructed what scholars call the “foundational narrative”—a story that transformed Japan’s catastrophic defeat into a necessary sacrifice for future prosperity and peace under US guidance.

Memories that contradicted this narrative—memories of loss, shame, trauma, American violence, Japanese aggression—were systematically suppressed. The nation was told to move forward, to become modern, to embrace the economic miracle.

But trauma doesn’t disappear because you refuse to name it. It seeps into the culture through cracks. It manifests in art, in literature, in the strange, grainy photographs of a young man walking Tokyo’s streets with a compact camera, shooting without looking through the viewfinder.

EXISTENTIALISM IN THE RUBBLE

The 1960s in Japan were years of profound cognitive dissonance. The country was simultaneously experiencing explosive economic growth and violent political protest. Students and workers filled the streets, raging against Japan’s alliance with the United States, against the westernisation of Japanese culture, against the rapid, brutal urbanisation that compressed a century of American development into 25 years. The process left an entire generation feeling uprooted, disoriented, spiritually homeless in their own cities.

Moriyama’s closest friend and fellow Provoke member, Takuma Nakahira, was deeply engaged with French leftist politics and existentialist philosophy—particularly the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.

(Funnily enough, I had the name of this French philosopher tattooed on my leg, and got into reading and becoming a fan of Jean-Paul much later after my time in Japan).

The existential crisis that Sartre articulated—the terror of radical freedom, the absurdity of existence, the individual’s confrontation with meaninglessness—resonated powerfully in Japan. Here was a nation that had lost its foundational myths: the divinity of the Emperor, the righteousness of empire, even the coherence of “Japaneseness” itself as American cultural products flooded the market.

Moriyama’s photographs from this period capture this existential vertigo. His subjects—often photographed from tilted angles, partially obscured, dissolved into grain—appear entrapped, isolated, anonymous. A stray dog on a beach becomes a symbol of abandonment. Bodies in underground theatres seem both hyper-present and ghostly. Consumer products blur into abstraction, suggesting the emptiness of Japan’s new materialism.

The critic Kōji Taki, another Provoke founder, felt that government ideology was threatening the “neutrality of art” and influencing photographers’ aesthetic choices. Provoke’s response was radical: they would create images that resisted language itself, that existed prior to interpretation, that captured what Taki called “the special language of photography”—a visual grammar that could express the darkness, uncertainty, and disquiet of the era.

BRUTALISM OF THE EVERYDAY

What strikes me most about Moriyama’s work from the 1960s and 70s is its unflinching brutality—not the brutality of explicit violence, but of attention. He photographs everyday Japanese life with the intensity of a crime scene investigation. Nothing is beautified. Nothing is resolved.

A woman’s legs in mesh tights. A scrap of advertising. The reflection in a puddle. The back of someone’s head on a train. These aren’t decisive moments. They’re accumulations of visual data that suggest reality is too fragmented, too overwhelming, to be captured in a single, well-composed frame.

This approach mirrors the psychological state of a nation trying to process incomprehensible loss while being forced into relentless forward motion. The American occupation lasted from 1945 to 1952, but its influence persisted far beyond. Japan was simultaneously being rebuilt by its conqueror and required to perform gratitude for its modernisation. Traditional values were declared obsolete. Concrete replaced wood. Highways sliced through neighbourhoods. The visual landscape of Japan changed so rapidly that memory itself became unreliable.

Moriyama described this transformation: “Chaotic everyday existence is what I think Japan is all about. This kind of theatricality is not just a metaphor but is also, I think, our actual reality.” The theatricality wasn’t performance—it was survival. The chaos wasn’t disorder—it was the truth beneath the veneer of order.

THE VIOLENCE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH

There’s a particular photograph from Moriyama’s series “A Hunter” (1967-1972) that embodies his philosophy. It’s the image of a stray dog, shot in harsh black and white, the animal’s body emerging from darkness, its eyes reflecting the camera flash. The dog looks simultaneously feral and vulnerable, caught mid-stride, existing in a moment of pure animal presence.

Moriyama later adopted this image as a kind of self-portrait, even titling his 1999 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art “Stray Dog.” He saw himself in that animal—wandering, untethered, surviving on the margins, documenting from a position of radical alienation.

But the photograph is also violent. Not to the dog, but to the viewer. Its grain is so pronounced the image threatens to dissolve. The contrast is so extreme that details vanish into pure black or white. This is photography that attacks the comfortable distance between observer and observed. It forces you to confront the limits of vision, the way reality exceeds our capacity to capture it.

The photographer and critic Minoru Shimizu wrote of Moriyama’s aesthetic: “These are all expressions of a kind of ‘subtraction,’ a means to erase the photographer’s self, his thoughts, subjective expressions and intentions… To Moriyama, grainy, blurry, out-of-focus was an important method of deletion, but only in order to show the real world as it was.” The real world, Shimizu argued, could only appear if “the usual world disappears.” The membrane of false reality had to be torn away, leaving scars.

This is the crucial insight: Moriyama’s technical “failures” were deliberate acts of destruction aimed at revealing something more authentic. By refusing the clarity that conventional photography promised, he acknowledged what post-war Japanese society refused to admit—that clarity was impossible, that the wounds were still open, that the real could only be approached through fragmentation.

IN SEARCH OF TRUE REALISM

In my years living in Japan, I experienced anxiety, loneliness masqueraded as artistic self-discipline, substance abuse, haziness, decadence, joy, gluttony, guilt and all spectrums of bodily and mental states in between. So when I think about what realism is, I find extreme sympathy with Moriyama Daido’s work. 

Moriyama’s work operates as subjective realism. His 1972 photobook “Farewell Photography” represented his most radical attempt to dismantle the medium entirely, accompanied by an interview with Nakahira that questioned photography’s fundamental assumptions. 

“So far, realism generally meant objective newspaper photographs – in other words photographs that had been taken close to the scene. A supremacy of locality, of you will. Or it meant extremely symbolic, schematic photographs that confuse a certain apparent condition with reality – in other words the kind of stuff that’s usually labeled “reportage.” All other photography is called artistic photography, of all things, and gets the label “subjective”photography.

When I said earlier that I didn’t understand Ken Domon after all, it is because he has not taken a single step away from that distinction. Also, when people talk about realism, they often mention the “heaviness” of reality. But there’s never any reality proposed other than a heavy one, and what and where and why it is heavy is never made clear. When they were saying what a tragedy Vietnam is, they didn’t see anything in their heads but a symbol of the tragic Vietnam. An illustration of a symbolized tragedy, really. And then they hallucinate that what they see in their heads is reality. But it’s nothing but a confusion of reality and its simulacrum. They are on the outside of reality all the time. Even their bodies.

And that’s why their photographs are, plain and simple, only representations. They are definitely not photographs. And then they have the gall to say that my photographs aren’t realism, that they are blurry, and out-of-focus, and contemporary. That’s why, my dear friend I think it might be best to clearly call my photographs realism already, and to call me a realist.”

Extracted from Moriyama's hotel interview with Nakahira, from the "Farewell Photography" book

THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE LENS

What Moriyama understood was that the photographer doesn’t capture reality; the photographer is captured by reality. He described his process as one of wandering, of allowing the city to act upon him, of shooting instinctively, often without looking through the viewfinder. It was surrender to circumstance, and an acknowledgment that the photographer is as much subject as the photographed.

This philosophy has profound implications for understanding how we process collective trauma. Moriyama’s work suggests that traumatic experience resists coherent narrative, that it exists as fragments—somatic, visual, pre-linguistic. 

His contemporary, writer Yukio Mishima, dealt with post-war Japanese identity crisis through increasingly desperate theatrical gestures, culminating in his ritual suicide in 1970. Other artists fell into silence or commodification. Moriyama chose another path: relentless documentation, even—especially—when the act of seeing became painful, when the image refused to cohere.

INFLUENCE AND LEGACY

Moriyama’s impact extends far beyond Japan. His aesthetic influenced American artist Christopher Wool and photographer John Gossage. His approach to the photobook—treating it as a primary medium rather than a collection of prints—reshaped how photographers conceive of publication. He has published over 150 books since 1968, each one a chapter in an ongoing conversation with visibility itself.

Contemporary Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota, part of a younger generation, describes Moriyama’s legacy as teaching “optical experiences” rather than just providing influence. This distinction matters. Moriyama didn’t offer a style to imitate; he demonstrated a way of seeing that acknowledged the fragility of vision, the provisional nature of the image, the necessity of working within failure.

When I bought those Japanese photobooks as a student, I was participating in the same act of translation that defines Moriyama’s project: attempting to make meaning from fragments, to construct understanding across the gap between intention and comprehension, to find beauty in what cannot be fully grasped.

THE WOUND THAT HEALS

In his 2006 revival of “Record” magazine, which he publishes independently to this day in over 50 issues, Moriyama continues his urban explorations. Now in his late 80s, he still walks Tokyo’s streets, still shoots prolifically, still refuses to settle into a safe, historical position. The work remains urgent, unresolved, searching.

This persistence illuminates something essential about the relationship between art and trauma. Moriyama’s photographs don’t heal the wound of post-war Japan—they keep it visible, prevent it from being sealed over by false narratives of seamless progress and recovered wholeness. They insist that the rupture remains, that the trauma shapes the present, that honest vision requires acknowledging damage.

But there is something redemptive in this honesty. By refusing to look away, by documenting the chaos and darkness and fragmentation of post-war urban life, Moriyama created a body of work that validates the experience of an entire generation. His images say: what you felt was real. The disorientation was real. The sense of profound loss and dislocation was not personal failure but historical condition.

This is the paradox of Moriyama’s art: photographs that seem to dissolve reality actually make it more present. Images that reject clarity achieve a deeper truthfulness. A stray dog becomes a nation. Blur becomes precision. Darkness becomes illumination.

WITNESSING AS PRACTICE

What I learned from Moriyama, both through his photographs and through the experience of living in the Japan they documented, is that bearing witness doesn’t require perfect vision. Sometimes the blurred image is truer than the sharp one. Sometimes the grain contains more information than the smooth surface. Sometimes you must shoot without looking through the viewfinder because the act of framing would falsify what you’re trying to see.

This is particularly relevant now, as we confront our own collective traumas, our own attempts at organised forgetting, our own fragmenting realities. Moriyama’s work offers a model for honesty that doesn’t demand resolution, for documentation that accepts its own limitations, for art that dwells in the wound rather than rushing toward cure.

He once wrote about Nicéphore Niépce’s 1827 photograph—the first photograph ever made—as being deeply important to him. That grainy, confusing, eloquent picture of sunlight moving across a courtyard represented photography’s origin as something imperfect, uncertain, but undeniably real. Moriyama spent his career honouring that imperfection, insisting that the medium’s truth lies not in its capacity for precision but in its acknowledgment of limitation.

In the end, Daido Moriyama transformed the psychology of an era into an art form that refuses consolation but offers something more valuable: recognition.