Daido Moriyama

LSS NYC

“The Taste of Distance”

2025 September 3 to October 12

Long Story Short presents Daido Moriyama: The Taste of Distance, on view September 3 – October 12, 2025, at 52 Henry Street, New York. First realized at Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2016, this groundbreaking participatory project now comes to New York for the first time. At its center is the creation of Record (mazemaze)—a special edition of Moriyama’s long-running photobook series Record—through which visitors are invited to collaborate directly in the making of his work, underscoring the democratic and continually evolving nature of his practice.

Since the 1960s, Moriyama has radically redefined the possibilities of photography. His grainy, high-contrast images of city streets, anonymous figures, and overlooked details have come to symbolize both the vitality and disorientation of contemporary urban life. Embracing immediacy and imperfection, his photographs resist narrative closure, privileging sensation and encounter over fixed meaning.

At the heart of The Taste of Distance is a collaborative workshop in which audiences assemble their own unique photobook from Moriyama’s photographic material. Each iteration of Record(mazemaze) reflects the artist’s embrace of repetition and variation, expanding his idea that photography is not a singular object but an open-ended process of re-seeing and re-making.

The exhibition further situates Record (mazemaze) within the larger trajectory of Moriyama’s photobook series Record. First published between 1972 and 1973 and revived in 2006, the series has grown to encompass 60 volumes as of 2025. Functioning as a visual diary, Record presents fleeting impressions of everyday life—graffiti, stray dogs, shop windows, shifting textures—that collectively form a portrait of time, place, and perception.

Complementing the participatory element, the exhibition also presents a selection of Moriyama’s photographs alongside a video projection in the back room of 52 Henry, featuring slideshows from other volumes of his Record series. Together, the workshop, prints, and projection affirm the artist’s enduring commitment to photography as a medium of immediacy, multiplicity, and continual reinvention.

For over six decades, Moriyama has shaped the trajectory of contemporary photography, with major retrospectives at Tate Modern, London (2012), the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011), and the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2016). The Taste of Distance offers New York audiences a rare opportunity to encounter his work not only as images but as living documents shaped by participation and chance.

Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka, Japan) is among the most influential photographers of the postwar era. From his early involvement with the Provoke movement to his ongoing experiments with books, prints, and participatory projects, his practice emphasizes the fragmentary and provisional nature of vision. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and many others worldwide.