PHOTOGRAPHERS from Japan

Top 3

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Japanese Photographers of all time. This list of famous Japanese Photographers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Nobuyoshi Araki (1940 - )

With an HPI of 59.60, Nobuyoshi Araki is the most famous Japanese Photographer.  His biography has been translated into 23 different languages on wikipedia.

Nobuyoshi Araki (荒木 経惟, Araki Nobuyoshi, May 25, 1940) is a Japanese photographer and contemporary artist professionally known by the mononym Arākii (アラーキー). Known primarily for photography that blends eroticism and bondage in a fine art context, he has published over 500 books.

2. Daidō Moriyama (1938 - )

With an HPI of 55.37, Daidō Moriyama is the 2nd most famous Japanese Photographer.  His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Daidō Moriyama (Japanese: 森山 大道, Hepburn: Moriyama Daidō, born October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and association with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke. Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and made his mark with his first photobook Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze. Many of his well-known works from the 1960s and 1970s are read through the lenses of post-war reconstruction and post-Occupation cultural upheaval. Moriyama continued to experiment with the representative possibilities offered by the camera in his 1969 Accident series, which was serialized over one year in the photo magazine Asahi Camera, in which he deployed his camera as a copying machine to reproduce existing media images. His 1972 photobook Farewell Photography, which was accompanied by an interview with his fellow Provoke photographer Takuma Nakahira, presents his radical effort to dismantle the medium. Although the photobook is a favored format of presentation among Japanese photographers, Moriyama was particularly prolific: he has produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968. His creative career has been honored by a number of solo exhibitions by major institutions, along with his two-person exhibition with William Klein at Tate Modern in 2012–13. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Hasselblad Award in 2019 and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2012.

3. Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - )

With an HPI of 51.71, Hiroshi Sugimoto is the 3rd most famous Japanese Photographer.  His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi, born 23 February 1948) is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.