Casemore Gallery is pleased to present Dog and Man, a new exhibition bringing together iconic classics and more recent photographs by the legendary Japanese artist Daido Moriyama. The show turns its gaze on Tokyo, captured through Moriyama’s tireless pursuit of the city in both color and black-and-white works, while also revisiting some of his groundbreaking images from the 1960s and 70s.
Widely recognized as a pioneer of the snapshot aesthetic, Moriyama launched his career in the 1960s and quickly drew attention as a central figure of Provoke magazine. The group’s radical visual language—later described as are, bure, boke (grainy, blurred, out-of-focus)—shook the photographic establishment. Their high-contrast, gritty, and urgently framed pictures of postwar Japan helped establish a new global visual idiom. As Moriyama himself recalled, “Japan was changing at breakneck speed, and we wanted to capture that intensity.”
Dog and Man features selections from Moriyama’s early Provoke-era output: the charged and chaotic streets and back alleys of Tokyo, abstracted close-ups of women’s legs in fishnet stockings, and portraits of people navigating a society permanently altered by war—at once unsettled and exhilarating. At the heart of the exhibition stands a monumental gelatin silver print of perhaps Moriyama’s most iconic and mysterious photograph, Stray Dog.
In the decades since those early breakthroughs, Moriyama has remained relentlessly active, continuing to test the possibilities of photography through an extraordinary body of photobooks and prints. His latest works, on view here in both gelatin silver and rarely seen color pigment prints, reaffirm his lifelong fascination with Tokyo: a city of contradictions, where tradition and modernity collide in constant flux.
Taken together, the works reveal the arc of an artist who began as a revolutionary and grew into one of the medium’s true masters—still driven, still restless, still searching for what he calls “the end of photography.”

About the Author

Daido Moriyama was born in 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka, and grew up in the turbulent years that followed World War II. He became renowned for his stark, high-contrast black-and-white photographs, which vividly reflect the tensions between Japanese heritage and Western modernity. Early in his career, he contributed more than twenty articles to various magazines, presenting a wide-ranging portrait of Japanese life. This work earned him the Japan Photo Critics Association’s Newcomer Award in 1967.
With the radical photobook Farewell Photography (1972), Moriyama questioned the very foundations of the medium. The project led to a period of personal and artistic crisis, from which he only reemerged in the early 1980s. Returning to photography with renewed purpose, he explored both the nature of the photographic image and his own identity as an artist. At the same time, he revived his commitment to street photography, wandering extensively through cities such as Tokyo, New York, Paris, and London.
In 2006, Moriyama brought back Record magazine—originally produced between 1972 and 1973. The publication has since grown into a long-running project, now spanning 57 issues. Today, Moriyama continues to live and work in Tokyo, pursuing his restless vision of photography.

Daido Moriyama: Dog and Man
20 September – 1 November 2025
Casemore Gallery – San Francisco, CA

More info:

https://casemoregallery.com/
https://www.moriyamadaido.com/en/