Daido Moriyama may be Japan’s most high-profile photographer. The Osaka native has been snapping iconic photos — usually high-contrast, grainy, black-and-white street scenes — for over 50 years. He has won countless awards, had his work displayed in galleries worldwide, and been called the “godfather of Japanese street photography.”
But if “The Past is Always New, The Future is Always Nostalgic” is anything to go by, the person who cares least about that half-century legacy is Moriyama himself.
Shot in 2018, the year of Moriyama’s 80th birthday, the documentary centers around an effort to reproduce the photographer’s “Japan, A Photo Theater,” a legendary, long out-of-print book from 1968, in time for that year’s Paris Photo art fair.