Peter Fetterman Gallery is proud to present Daido Moriyama: The Hunter. For Daido Moriyama, photography has always been an act of pursuit and expression. He photographs instinctively—drawn not by subject, but by sensation. His images emerge from chance encounters: fragments of bodies, passing gestures, shadows, signage. The city unfolds as something restless and unresolved, a place to be experienced rather than explained. There was never the intention of going out and photographing life – it was always to experience life first, with a camera in hand.
Associated with the radical spirit of the Provoke movement, Moriyama rejected the idea of photography as a tool for clarity or description. Instead, he embraced a language that was raw and immediate—grainy, blurred, and out of focus—what came to be known as are, bure, boke. In his hands, the camera becomes an extension of movement itself, responding as quickly as the eye can register. It was pleasure, it was pain, beautiful and ugly—all that life had to offer intertwined at the foot of Moriyama and his camera. He reacted in ways that best illustrated the fast-paced reality of life on the street. And sometimes, behind closed doors—intimately, with others or alone—that same sporadic instinct followed.
To photograph, for Moriyama, is not to fix the world, but to collide with it. His images resist stillness. They flicker, dissolve, reappear, reproduce—suggesting a reality that is constantly shifting, never fully grasped. What remains is not a document, but a trace: a record of being there, of looking, of passing through.
Daido Moriyama: The Hunter brings together a selection of works that reflect this lifelong approach—restless, searching, and pulsing with life.
