Daido Moriyama has long been one of my favorite photographers. I somehow missed the Daido Moriyama / Shomei Tomatsu exhibition at Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie in 2021, so I was keen to see the exhibition currently at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which I hadn’t visited for a long time. 

Rather than a conventional chronological retrospective, the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson turns its gaze inward, probing Moriyama's lifelong obsession with the medium of photography itself. The opening room is devoted to his landmark book “Farewell to Photography”, first published in 1972, in which he defiantly abandoned the conventions of "good" photography. The staging, however, remains decidedly traditional: a selection of framed prints from the book lines one wall, a vitrine gathers its various editions, and a slideshow cycles through every page in turn.

At the heart of the exhibition lie the photographs Moriyama made on a twofold pilgrimage: first to the place where Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) captured what is widely regarded as the earliest photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras", and then to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the institution that now safeguards the original plate.

The final room shows a selection of photographs that are directly or indirectly related to the medium of photography: film rolls hanging from a laundry line, a close-up of an eye, a photo of a camera.

In Japan, Daido Moriyama is superstar. One of his most famous photos, “Stray Dog, Misawa” (1971) has even been made into a toy sized stuffed dog.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, which, in addition to numerous photographs, also includes a selection of essays (in French translation) that Moriyama has written for Japanese photography magazines since the 1960s.

Daido Moriyama. Lettres d’amour à la photographie is at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris until 4 October 2026.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou.

Irving Penn at the Grand Palais.

Juergen Teller: i need to live.

Anton Corbijn: Favourite Darkness at the Kunstforum Wien.