How to Create Beautiful Pictures From One Photograph

On a sunny day in December 1986, Daido Moriyama photographed passers-by on a staircase by Shinjuku station in Tokyo. That night, he printed the image and photographed nine details, creating a unique, resolutely conceptual group of ten photographs. He imagined infinite reproduction could lead to “a particle of photography”, and ultimately “to the other side of the image”. Exhibited for the first time, From One Photograph is the fourth of the famed “lessons” published in 1986–88 under the ironic title How to Create Beautiful Pictures.

Daido Moriyama was born in 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka, he lives and Tokyo. His work – his photographs, his writings, his books – is acclaimed throughout the world.

An art historian and curator, Clément Chéroux is the director of Fondation Cartier-Bresson were he recently curated Daido Moriyama: Love Letters to Photography.

Images and text from How to Create Beautiful Pictures 4: From One Photograph, first published in March 1987 issue of Japanese magazine Shashin Jidai, are reproduced in Daido Moriyama: Lettres d’amour à la photographie, co-published by Delpire & Co and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson on the occasion of the above mentioned exhibition, with introduction essays by Clément Chéroux and Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and is part of the Bicentenary of Photography.