Daido Moriyama: Quartet

Daido Moriyama Captured the Soul of Postwar Japan in Gritty, Groundbreaking Photographs

New Getty anthology brings together four iconic early-career photobooks—previously available only in limited Japanese editions

Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) spent his groundbreaking and illustrious career photographing the streets of Tokyo, exploring the city’s gritty underbelly with his handheld film camera. His black-and-white photographs—which feature subjects from train passengers to a car on fire to aerial views of postwar Tokyo—reveal Moriyama’s dramatic documentary style as he plays with light and shadow. Moriyama’s prolific work is marked by his sharp eye for subjects, use of heavy contrast, and tilted images.

Daido Moriyama: Quartet includes four seminal photobooks that established Moriyama as a radical, cutting-edge photographer: Japan: A Photo Theater, A Hunter, Farewell Photography, and Light and Shadow. Spanning the late 1960s to the early 1980s, his works uncover the landscape and humanity of postwar Japan. Edited by Mark Holborn, this compilation paints a picture of the history, pop culture and artistic practices that characterized Moriyama’s career and features an intimate look into his diaries and personal memorabilia. Holborn expertly describes Moriyama’s priority to “seize time” with his photographs, as well as his legacy chronicling the rawness of human experience and urban life in Japan. Presented in a slipcase, this volume is essential for all Moriyama fans and anyone passionate about photography and visual culture.

Mark Holborn is an editor and designer of illustrated books about a diverse range of artists, from William Eggleston to Lucian Freud. He is also a curator, author and specialist on Japanese culture.

A Hunter © Daido Moriyama, Photo Foundation

Light and Shadow © Daido Moriyama, Photo Foundation

About Getty Publications:
Getty Publications produces award-winning titles that result from or complement the work of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Conservation Institute, and Getty Research Institute. This wide variety of books covers the fields of art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities for both the general public and specialists. Publications include illustrated works on artists and art history, exhibition catalogues, works on cultural history, research on the conservation of materials and archaeological sites, scholarly monographs, critical editions of translated works, comprehensive studies of Getty's collections, and educational books on art to interest children of all ages.

Farewell Photography © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

About Thames & Hudson:
Thames & Hudson was founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Their passion and mission was to create a ‘museum without walls ’and to make accessible to a large reading public the world of art and the research of top scholars. To reflect its international outlook the name for the company linked the rivers flowing through London and New York, represented in its logo by two dolphins symbolizing friendship and intelligence. Seventy-five years on Thames & Hudson is still an independent, family-owned company and one of the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books with over 2,000 titles in print.

A Photo Theater © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album

By Todd Hido

Publisher : Aperture

2025 | 320 pages

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido's career, with ten years of new work.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book's first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido's major monographs, "The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken." From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

All About Todd Hido

Nick Brandt: The Echo of Our Voices: The Day May Break, Chapter Four

By Nick Brandt

Publisher : Skira

2025 | 128 pages

The fourth chapter of the celebrated series The Day May Break by the renowned photographer Nick Brandt, featuring Syrian refugee families, displaced by climate change in water-scarce Jordan

This is the fourth chapter of The Day May Break, photographer Nick Brandt's global series portraying people and animals impacted by climate change and environmental degradation. The series was photographed in Jordan, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. It features rural Syrian refugee families currently living there, whose lives have been seriously impacted by droughts intensified by climate change. Living lives of continuous displacement, they are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there is available agricultural work, to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow. The photographs show the families' connection and strength in the face of adversity, that when all else is lost you still have each other. The boxes on which the families gather aim skyward, pedestals for those in our society that are typically unseen and unheard.

All About Nick Brandt

Ed Kashi: A Period in Time: Looking Back while Moving Forward, 1977-2022

By Ed Kashi

Publisher : Briscoe Center for American History

2025 | 344 pages

Photographer Ed Kashi’s passion is long-term documentary projects that immerse him in issues that need attention or people’s lives whose struggles warrant concern. He has had a lengthy and varied career with National Geographic and other major magazines, traveling around the world to tell visual stories.

Kashi’s archive, now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, houses many of his personal memories and the experiences attached to the creation of those images. More than a simple repository of images, the archive is a growing, thriving, and continually evolving organism, a living library with immense value.

Through his photography, Kashi has had an intimate, front-row seat to witness and record major events in history. His work has been a passport to worlds unseen, unveiling issues that need illumination, documenting history in the making, and capturing the human experience and the many awe-inspiring places in our fragile world. A Period in Time is a testimony to some of Kashi’s most memorable stories—people he has been privileged to observe and learn from and the places and narratives that have shaped his life, all captured one moment at a time.

All About Ed Kashi

Bruce Davidson: The Way Back

By Bruce Davidson

Publisher : Steidl

2025 | 144 pages

Nearly four decades of unpublished works from a master of documentary photography

Consisting solely of previously unpublished photographs, The Way Back is a deep dive through Bruce Davidson’s more than 60-year career. The book chronologically presents photos made between 1957 and 1992, showcasing Davidson’s exceptional versatility―from his earliest assignments to later seminal bodies of work including his yearlong study of teenage members of a Brooklyn Gang (1959), his extensive coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement in Time of Change (1961–65) and his breakthrough portraits of the residents of a single block in Harlem in East 100th Street (1966–68). Series such as Subway (1980) and Central Park (1992) confirm Davidson as a quintessential chronicler of New York City.

What emerges through this retrospective is Davidson’s overt sensibility and empathy for his subjects and his commitment to documenting them in depth over time. Unlike his peers who photographed historical events, Davidson focused on the people within these histories. Now, drawing near the end of his long career, Davidson offers this book as a parting look at his artistic passage, an elegiac goodbye as well as a requiem.

Bruce Davidson (born 1933, Oak Park, IL) became a member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958; since then his photographs and photo series have been widely published to great acclaim. At Yale University, he studied under photographer Alexey Brodovitch and artist Josef Albers, the latter of whom encouraged him to pursue his work among marginalized people and communities. His artistic influences include Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Daido Moriyama: Quartet

Daido Moriyama Captured the Soul of Postwar Japan in Gritty, Groundbreaking Photographs

New Getty anthology brings together four iconic early-career photobooks—previously available only in limited Japanese editions

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