Stray dog
Daido Moriyama’s most famous photograph is of an almost rabid dog. As twinned outcasts, this dog has become the alter-ego of Daido himself. He explains in his memoirs that “I had taken a photograph of a stray dog showing the whites of its eyes and snarling, on the streets outside a US air base in the town of Misawa in Aomori Perfecture in northeast Japan… Thereafter that dog and I came to be seen and talked about as if somehow superimposed on each other. Also the figure I cast during that time, roaming around town and in the backstreets, carrying my camera, appeared in others’ eyes very much as a stray dog”.
Read a special interview of Daido Moriyama here, from a coffee shop in Shinjuku, a place in Tokyo where Daido made his name as a photographer. “My work is endless” he says. “As long as the world exists, I want to take snapshots.”
An introduction to his work can also be found in a well-written blog about Japanese photography, under a post about his exhibition in Foam Museum last year
Finally, not better place to start by flicking over photographs in the artist’s gallery in his website.
