He is best known for his wide-angle images of Tokyo, in a dark black and white, almost dirty, inappropriate. But Daidō Moriyama also distinguished himself, between 1969 and 1972, in erotic nude photography by participating in the visual and cultural revolution embodied by the Japanese magazine Provoke. Typical Japanese bondage scenes, strangely relocated in nature, various positions of an anonymous female body, on a bed, in a bathroom... In these natural poses, the voyeuristic dimension fades away and gives way to a feeling of relaxed, soothed and assumed intimacy, which contrasts all the more with the legendary Japanese modesty: a solar and non-demonic eroticism, purged of all forms of guilt and perversion. By reinventing the erotic nude, Daidō Moriyama draws the portrait of a society in identity crisis, which tries to find its own modernity by distancing itself from the shackles of its traditions on the one hand, and the mirages of the American dream on the other.
