Blind alleys: Daido Moriyama is a master of street photography

DAIDO MORIYAMA has explored the streets and alleys of Japan for five decades in search of inspiration for his next shot. When he pauses to contemplate the state of street photography in this digital age, the iconic photographer, who was born in Osaka in 1938, sounds like he's having a hard time deciding if his craft should count as a form of fine art.

"There will be fewer street photographers as technology evolves," Moriyama says through an interpreter when we meet at his solo show "Searching Journeys", a decades-spanning survey of his blurred, grainy and out-of-focus records of urban life in post-war Japan, often created from slanted angles.

Much of Moriyama's body of black-and-white photography - which is not immune to the occasional sordid image - was shot in the infamous red-light district Shinjuku in Tokyo, where he has lived since 1961. It's as much an artistic statement as it is a silent tribute to the outcasts, strippers and entertainers from the area that populated his first photo book, Japan: A Photo Theatre (1968).

"Photography has changed and has entered the field of art, but there aren't many people like me who are strictly doing street shooting now. I was hoping I could encourage more young people to follow my path, but unfortunately it hasn't happened. I suppose people today prefer to do something that's more fancy or trendy," he says.

Moriyama's desire to motivate a new generation of street photographers may stem from his own initiation into the art through the works of the American-born French artist William Klein. At the age of 17, Moriyama was already confident in his artistic talent, something that was confirmed by a brief engagement in the field of commercial design. "But once I was inspired by photography, I just didn't want to do anything else," he says.