How to Take Photographs Lessons from Daido Moriyama

ShutterLab · Street Photography Reference

How to Take PhotographsLessons from Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama is one of the most celebrated street photographers of the twentieth century. This guide distils his core philosophy, practical techniques, and location-based advice drawn from his landmark book How I Take Photographs (Laurence King, with Takeshi Nakamoto).

Contents

The Mindset Core Fundamentals Walking & MovementWhat to Look ForDesire & AwarenessLocation LessonsQuantity & PracticeGear PhilosophyConcepts & ThemesLight & DirectionIconic SubjectsSelf-Questioning

01 · Philosophy

The Fundamental Mindset

Moriyama's first and most emphatic instruction to any aspiring street photographer is deceptively simple: get outside. Everything flows from this. Photography, for him, is not a studio discipline or a technical exercise — it is an act of walking and seeing.

"Get outside. It's all about getting out and walking. That's the first thing. The second thing is, forget everything you've learned about photography for the moment, and just shoot."

— Daido Moriyama

The instruction to forget what you know is deliberate. Over-thinking technical or conceptual concerns before you even raise the camera is the enemy of the snapshot. The street rewards presence and instinct, not preparation.

Street photography, in Moriyama's definition, is about capturing the natural movement and authentic expression of your subject in a single, unrepeatable moment. It is not constructed or staged. It simply happens — and your job is to be there when it does.

02 · Technique

Core Fundamentals

Moriyama's approach to the mechanics of shooting is ruthlessly stripped back. After decades on the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, Shinjuku, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires, his practice has converged on a handful of repeatable principles.

Fundamental 01

Shoot Everything

Don't pause to evaluate whether something is worth photographing. Take photographs of anything and everything that catches your eye. Selective hesitation costs you the moment.

Fundamental 02

Don't Pause to Think

The instant between seeing and pressing the shutter is where most shots are lost. Train yourself to react. Thinking is for later — reviewing, editing, reflecting.

Fundamental 03

Shoot from the Hip

Moriyama often holds his camera at chest height and fires the shutter repeatedly without looking through the viewfinder, keeping the shutter button pressed for burst after burst in quick succession.

Fundamental 04

Quality Comes from Quantity

He has always maintained that quality only comes with quantity. He is known to exhaust a full 36-exposure roll of film in under 100 metres of walking. Volume is not laziness — it is methodology.

Fundamental 05

Take Lots of Shots

You won't see what you're taking unless you take lots of shots. Without a good number of exposures, you won't understand what you want to capture — or recognise what was in front of you.

Fundamental 06

Give Your Subject Attention First

Choose your subject and observe it closely. Give it your undivided attention before you raise the camera — only then capture it. Awareness precedes the image.

03 · On the Street

Walking & Movement

How Moriyama moves through a location is as considered as how he shoots. Watching him work, his biographer Nakamoto notes the photographer is in constant motion — darting into alleyways, doubling back, pausing mid-stride, running, turning around.

The Two-Direction RuleWhen photographing a shopping street or boulevard, always walk it twice — once up, once back down. Light falls differently in each direction. Something that looked worthless against the light may be transformed when illuminated from the front. If time is short, at minimum turn around and shoot back the way you came.

The repetition is not redundancy — it is thoroughness. Different angles, different light, different moments with passing people. A street seen only once has been half-seen.

When Moriyama spots an alleyway or something that catches his interest, he heads towards it at a run, certain of what he might find. He doesn't wait at a polite distance — he closes the gap. Proximity matters.

"I'm just concentrating on the moment. Thinking out each and every instant. How should I take the next few shots?"

— Daido Moriyama

Even when stationary, Moriyama is active. He describes standing at the viewfinder, doing nothing, waiting to see whether something — anything — presents itself. He is not waiting for a specific subject. He is simply remaining open.

For your daily commute or regular routes: Moriyama specifically recommends photographing ordinary journeys — the walk to a station, a familiar shopping street. Repetition deepens your observation. Shooting the same street over and over teaches you more about photography and about your own seeing than any single dramatic location.

04 · Seeing

What to Look For

In a shopping street, Moriyama frames his purpose clearly: you are photographing the interaction between people and the street. That is the primary subject. Everything else is texture within it.

Look For 01

People and the Street

Focus on how people interact with their environment — not just portraits of individuals, but the relationship between a person and the urban space they occupy.

Look For 02

Food and Goods on Display

Pay attention to food and other objects displayed in storefronts — the variety, the arrangement, the chaos. These are as much the street as the people walking through it.

Look For 03

Signage, Posters, Adverts

The visual language of a place — posters, handwritten signs, advertising hoardings — tells you what a neighbourhood is. Don't skip over it.

Look For 04

Details, Not Just Wide Shots

Don't settle for vague, wide-angle documentation. Look closely at specific objects — in all their variety. The detail that most people walk past is often the most revealing.

Look For 05

The Alien and Unknown

The city streets contain everything that is outside your comfort zone. Every person you don't know, every situation you haven't seen before — that's the material. You're capturing the alien and unknown.

Look For 06

The "Smell of Humanity"

Moriyama returns repeatedly to places that have what he calls the smell of humanity — the cramped, unpolished, intensely human quality of traditional working districts. Look for warmth, wear, and life.

Moriyama's advice not to take wide, vague shots of a road and all the people going about their shopping is worth sitting with. The wide establishing shot is often a substitute for actual seeing. Get closer. Get specific.

05 · Inner State

Desire & Awareness

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Moriyama's philosophy is his emphasis on the emotional and almost physiological state of the photographer. Technical ability matters far less than a particular inner quality he calls desire.

"Above all, you have to have desire. That desire the photographer must feel in the instant they take the shot. If you don't have desire, you won't see what's there."

— Daido Moriyama

This is not desire in an abstract sense. It is the specific, physical compulsion you feel in the instant when you see something that makes you want to press the shutter. Moriyama describes it as something that happens in the body before the mind has formed a judgement about the image.

The corollary is that technical proficiency alone is insufficient. A photographer who knows every setting and every rule but lacks this quality of desire will produce images that are technically correct but emotionally inert. The desire is the thing that makes a photograph interesting or meaningful.

The snapshot as a cast netMoriyama's image for what a snapshot is: it is like a cast net. Your desire compels you to throw it out. You throw it out. You snag whatever happens to come back — it's like an accidental moment. The snapshot is not a plan. It is a throw.

To take a photograph that is at all interesting or meaningful, you must become one with that desire in the moment you press the shutter. The desire and the act are the same thing.

06 · Location

Location Lessons from Moriyama's Shoots

Each of the five locations in Moriyama's book yields specific practical lessons. The locations differ — a traditional shopping street, an urban waterfront, an upmarket district, an airport, and a highway — but the underlying principles apply universally.

Location 01

Sunamachi — The Shopping Street

Moriyama's ideal starting environment for any photographer: a busy shopping street near a railway station. He recommends these specifically because they contain everything — a huge variety of things, and a huge variety of people — all mixed up together. Walk the full length twice. Shoot the interaction between people and the street. Don't ignore the goods and storefronts. Exhaust the location rather than moving on after a few shots.

Location 02

Tsukudajima — Water's Edge

Photographs taken near water carry an inherent risk of becoming dreamy and overly poetic, which can be both good and bad. Moriyama's advice here: shoot straight into the sun. When you take pictures into or partially into the sun, subjects by the water look very sharp, and reflections create nuances of light that are impossible with the sun behind you. He also warns that shooting with the sun behind you tends to produce images without nuance — flat, uninflected, postcard-safe.

Location 03

Ginza — The High-End District

Moriyama spent decades avoiding Ginza because it didn't feel like his territory. Eventually he learned a broader lesson: never dismiss a location out of hand. Even somewhere you don't naturally gravitate towards will change you slightly — alter your consciousness, introduce new stimuli. When that happens, you find desire for shots you wouldn't have considered elsewhere. Being in an unfamiliar environment heightens the alien quality that is the core of street photography.

Location 04

Haneda Airport — Neutral Space

For a vast, empty, indifferent space, match the mood — take neutral and indifferent pictures. Don't force the urgency of human life onto a place that lacks it. The most typical photograph of such a location might be a boring one: a truck, a windscreen, a plain stretch of road. The "smell" of a place is what you're after, not spectacular imagery. What a location feels like to be in is more important than what it looks like from a distance.

Location 05

Highway — Shooting from a Moving Car

Moriyama has spent decades taking photographs from moving vehicles, inspired by Jack Kerouac. The key insight: speed acts as a filter. You can only pick up certain things when you are moving along inside a moving car. Your vision behaves differently at speed. Scenes present themselves in a way they never would on foot. As soon as something flashes up — take the shot immediately. If something intrigues you from the window, stop and get out to explore it on foot.

07 · Practice

Quantity, Repetition & Practice

There is a strong anti-perfectionist streak running through everything Moriyama says. He is actively hostile to the idea that waiting for the right moment and then taking one careful shot is the correct approach to street photography.

"You won't see what it is you're taking unless you take lots of shots — at least, that's true with street shots. Without a good number of shots, you won't really see what it is you're taking."

— Daido Moriyama

The relationship between looking and shooting is reciprocal for Moriyama. You do not see clearly and then shoot. You shoot your way towards clarity. The act of taking photographs is itself the act of understanding what you are looking at.

Practice 01

Photograph Your Regular Journeys

Shoot lots of shots on your ordinary daily commutes, your walk to the station, the streets you use every day. These familiar routes are training grounds, and you'll be surprised what you find when you start looking.

Practice 02

Return to the Same Locations

Taking shots over and over of the same shopping street will do more than teach you snapshots — it will help you become a better photographer all round. Repetition refines your powers of observation.

Practice 03

Don't Review Obsessively

With digital cameras, Moriyama purposely doesn't delete any shots. A shot you dislike immediately after taking it might seem excellent when you look at it later. Never delete in the field.

Practice 04

Give One Object Your Full Attention

For documentary work, choose an inanimate object and photograph it exhaustively — Moriyama expects students to use at least ten rolls of film on a single house. You won't develop a discerning eye without learning to give something your full and undivided attention.

08 · Equipment

Gear Philosophy

Moriyama's equipment philosophy is as stripped back as his shooting philosophy. The camera is a tool, not a statement. What matters is that it is small enough to disappear, light enough to carry everywhere, and simple enough not to get between the photographer and the moment.

On choosing a cameraIt doesn't matter what kind of camera you're using — a toy camera, a Polaroid, a compact digital, whatever. It doesn't matter. As long as a camera is small, light, and takes good shots, what more can you ask for? With a compact camera you just point and shoot — which makes you think about the composition. You inevitably want to take considered shots.

Moriyama has carried a compact camera small enough to fit in the back pocket of his jeans for his entire career. He has never liked lugging heavy cameras or tripods. The compact's limitations become strengths: quick to raise, unobtrusive, unpretentious.

On film versus digital: Moriyama completed his transition to digital without sentimentality. Digital cameras are simply better suited to the quantity-driven, improvisational method he has always practised. There is no film to change, no cost per frame, and the LCD panel stimulates the desire to keep shooting.

He notes that people sometimes tell him his digital photographs still have the look and feel of film photographs. His response is characteristic: he is not too worried about that. The tool changes; the eye and the desire do not.

09 · The Unencumbered Eye

Abandon Concepts & Themes

One of Moriyama's more provocative positions is his insistence that photographers should put aside concepts or themes when they go out on a shoot. This is a deliberate departure from the approach taught in most photography programmes.

"The photographer should just shoot whatever they observe, using all their senses, and if possible unselectively."

— Daido Moriyama

His reasoning: if you go to a place with an agenda related to what's going on socially or politically, and try to take shots that underpin that agenda, you're not going to get anywhere. Any concept or theme you try to express will be utterly insignificant compared to the amount of information stored instantaneously in the image itself.

The photograph always contains vastly more information than the person behind the camera had in mind. The street will exceed your concept every time. Better to abandon the concept and let the street speak.

He is equally direct about this with his own early work: when he photographed Yokosuka, he knew he wanted to take pictures there, but he had no agenda. He never thought, "Right, I'm going to explore the political tensions in Yokosuka." He simply went and shot pictures.

10 · Light

Understanding Light Direction

Despite the apparent nonchalance of his shooting style, Moriyama is acutely aware of light and uses it deliberately. Several specific pieces of advice on light recur through his practice.

Light 01

Walk Both Directions

Light always falls a particular way when you go up a street, and differently when you come back. Something seen against the light may look worthless, but the same subject lit from the front may be transformed. Always see both sides.

Light 02

Shoot Into the Sun at Water

At the water's edge, shoot into or partially into the sun. Subjects look sharper, reflections produce nuance, and the light creates interesting ideas. Sun behind you flattens everything.

Light 03

Black & White Magnifies Nuance

Black-and-white photographs are more evocative near water because less is more — the absence of colour focuses attention on form, tone, and texture. Colour near water can feel dreamy in ways that undermine the sharpness of the image.

Light 04

Know Your Light Without Checking

Moriyama reports that he knows without checking whether the light is a problem. Developing an instinctive awareness of ambient light — so you never need to take your eye off the scene to verify settings — is a fundamental skill.

11 · Subject Selection

On Iconic & Clichéd Subjects

Moriyama spent years avoiding what he considered clichéd or iconic subjects — famous landmarks, celebrated locations, well-worn angles. He now regards this as a mistake, and his evolution on the subject is instructive.

"I've come to think that not to take photographs of these places just because they have iconic status is pretty stupid."

— Daido Moriyama

The change came when he returned to collections of photographs he had taken decades earlier. The passage of time erased all his original intentions and concepts from the images. What remained was simply what was in the photograph — independent of any thought he had had about it when taking it.

The practical lesson: do not hold back from photographing a subject because it seems too obvious, too associated with other photographers, or too likely to look like a postcard. Occasionally the Kaminarimon temple gate really does look strange and different and worth photographing. Rigidly refusing to shoot it because it's an Asakusa icon is self-defeating.

On postcard shotsMoriyama actively rehabilitates the "postcard shot" as a category. Photographs used on postcards are all excellent images — the term should never be used to dismiss a photograph. Most postcard shots are taken from a position slightly more elevated than the subject, which is an effective and underrated technique. Whoever first figured that out was a real genius.

He also used to tilt the horizon in landscape shots to add instability and avoid the postcard quality. He no longer bothers. The instinct to differentiate oneself from the obvious can itself become a constraint as limiting as the cliché it tries to avoid.

12 · The Inner Life

Self-Questioning & Doubt

Moriyama is not only a practitioner but a philosopher of photography. Beneath the relentless, obsessive shooting is a parallel life of questioning — about what photography is, what it captures, what it means, and whether he himself understands it.

"I'm continually in dialogue with myself, with another self who wants to disprove, or at least raise questions about, all the statements I make."

— Daido Moriyama

He has written that there is a part of him that is always rushing ahead, intent only on the next image — but another part feels a deep lack of certainty about all the scenes he passes through. What did they mean? Can he really say definitively what they were? This tension — between the desire to capture and the doubt about whether capturing is enough — has been central to his practice for his entire career.

At one point in the 1970s, after years of car-based highway photography, this sense of loss became overwhelming. He stopped photography entirely, withdrew from the world, and was unable to take a single shot for several long, difficult years. His recovery came not through a grand gesture but through returning to the most basic act: photographing some light and shade he saw in front of him.

The lesson is not that doubt is something to overcome. It is something to carry with you. To engage in street photography like Moriyama is to never stop posing questions — of the world, of the camera, and of yourself. The questions don't have answers. They have photographs.

The final instructionThe only way you can ensure that a shot will ever be at all meaningful is if you take it. Don't think too hard about it beforehand. Don't be too self-conscious or rational. Just press the shutter button. There will be all the time in the world for others to come along later and attach whatever meaning they like to it.

ShutterLab

Reference guide compiled from How I Take Photographs by Daido Moriyama
(Laurence King Publishing, with Takeshi Nakamoto)

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