The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation is presenting ‘Daido Moriyama – Love Letters to Photography’ until 4 October 2026, an exhibition of 60 prints accompanied by documents and publications, organised into four sections and curated by Clément Chéroux. Above all, this is not a conventional chronological retrospective: the exhibition traces the almost existential obsession that Moriyama has harboured since the 1960s with photography itself.
This may well be exactly the exhibition we need right now.
Because we are living in a paradoxical age: never before have we produced so many images, and never before have they been so technically flawless. Our phones correct the light, stabilise movement, reconstruct the night and erase imperfections. Software enhances faces. Artificial intelligence can now create a photograph that doesn’t even need to have been taken.
And along comes Moriyama with his magnificent mess.
In 1972, he published *Shashin yo sayonara* — *Farewell to Photography* — a radical work in which he specifically challenges the conventions of ‘well-made’ photography. Blurry, dark, off-centre, grainy images, subjects that are sometimes barely recognisable: what looks like a collection of technical errors becomes a way of breaking free from a certain photographic orthodoxy.
This is where Moriyama becomes fascinating, even beyond Moriyama himself.
For what, exactly, is a successful photograph?
The question seems naïve. It is dizzying.
An image that is perfectly exposed, perfectly sharp and perfectly composed can be perfectly lifeless. Conversely, a photograph that is technically disastrous can haunt you for twenty years. There are images that are shaky but alive, poorly framed images that tell a greater story than those where every element is exactly where it should be.
Moriyama photographs as one walks through a city. He captures. He takes. He reacts. He accepts that the world moves faster than he does.
His famous *Stray Dog*, photographed in Misawa in 1971 and featured in the exhibition, has become one of those iconic images. Yet the exhibition deliberately avoids turning itself into a display of trophies. Images, books, publications and texts engage in a dialogue to show that, for him, taking photographs and reflecting on photography are practically one and the same activity.
There is even something obsessive about his relationship with the medium’s origins. For decades, Moriyama has been fascinated by Nicéphore Niépce’s *Point de vue du Gras*, even going so far as to undertake photographic pilgrimages in its footsteps. He has also been photographing a reproduction of this image, which he keeps at home, for years.
All of this could become terribly intellectual.
It isn’t.
Because, at the end of the day, what remains is something extraordinarily simple: a man, a camera and the world passing before him.
And perhaps that is what makes this exhibition so contemporary. In our quest to create perfect images, we risk forgetting why we started taking photographs in the first place: not necessarily to produce something beautiful, but to capture something that was there and which, a second later, will be gone.
Photography has never needed to be perfect.
It needs to be alive.
And in Daido Moriyama’s work, fortunately, it still trembles.
Daido Moriyama – Love Letters to Photography, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, until 4 October 2026.
