Artist Reflection: Daido Moriyama

Daidō Moriyama (Japanese: 森山 大道, Hepburn: Moriyama Daidō, born on October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and involvement with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke.

Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and established himself with his debut photobook, Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His early work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker aspects of postwar Japanese urban life in a rough, unrestrained manner, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer’s wandering gaze. Many of his well-known paintings from the 1960s and 1970s are interpreted through the prism of postwar reconstruction.

Artist Reflection:  Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France. His father was a wealthy textile entrepreneur whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a common component of French sewing kits. His mother’s family was a cotton merchant and landowner from Normandy, where Henri spent some of his boyhood. His mother was a descendant of Charlotte Corday. The Cartier-Bresson family lived on Rue de Lisbonne in Paris, near the Place de l’Europe and Parc Monceau. Henri pursued photography with greater freedom than his peers since his parents supported him financially. Henri also made sketches. Young Henri used a Box Brownie for holiday photographs and later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in classic French bourgeois fashion, and he was expected to address his parents with polite vous rather than tu.