Daido Moriyama harps on Modern occidental artists like Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph in front of the Hôtel de Ville and Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare. But above all, it is Eugene Atget and his Photographe de Paris influence that looms over his work. On Moriyama’s images, one can find either narrow streets photographed day and night and cramped with often-empty shops, or beggars lost in the city’s architecture. Paris also shows Daido Moriyama’s almost obsessive love of graphic games and shop windows.

By the end of the seventies, Daido Moriyama had exchanged several conversations with Takuma Nakahira, co-founder of the Provoke magazine and author of a visionary essay on Eugene Atget’s work Looking at the city, or the Look from the City (1973).