Opening Record 2 feels less like picking up a photobook – although it is, without doubt, one of the best photography books on street photography – and more like stepping inside Daido Moriyama’s ongoing dialogue with the world. This volume brings together the images and texts from issues 31–50 of Record – Moriyama’s long-running personal journal publication – and serves as the sequel to Record, the first collected volume gathering issues 1–30, published by Thames & Hudson in 2017. Seen together, these chapters form a vivid continuum, revealing how the act of daily looking became not only Moriyama’s method but his philosophy of shooting the streets of Japan.
To understand the book’s impact, it is worth remembering who Moriyama is and what he represents. A central figure in post-war Japanese photography, he rose to prominence in the late 1960s and became one of the defining forces behind the Provoke movement. His signature language of are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) fractured traditional photographic expectations and prioritised sensation over clarity. It was a radical, almost confrontational way of seeing, and it permanently shifted the vocabulary of street photography.
