Moriyama does not appear to have a preferred hour. He appears to have preferred a state.
The state is one of continuous movement through a city, camera raised, at whatever hour the city happens to be doing something worth photographing. This turns out to be most hours. Tokyo, Shinjuku in particular, does not have a quiet period so much as it has different registers of noise. Moriyama photographed all of them.
The City That Does Not Sleep Slowly
Most photography practice built around time of day assumes a city that quiets down. Golden hour works partly because the streets thin out, the light goes warm and directional, and the visual noise of a busy city reduces to something manageable. Moriyama’s Tokyo does not do this. Shinjuku at 2am is not quieter than Shinjuku at 2pm. It is differently loud.
This forced a different relationship with time. Rather than waiting for the city to become photographable, Moriyama treated every hour as photographable on its own terms. The question was not when to go out. The question was what each hour made available that the others did not.
What late night made available: neon, wet pavement, the faces of people who were not performing sobriety or composure. What early morning made available: the residue of the night before, the city in the process of resetting, the specific quality of flat grey light before the sun has established itself. What the middle of the day made available: everything happening at once, too fast, too close, in too much light.
Moriyama photographed all three and treated none of them as inferior.
Grain as a Response to Light
Moriyama’s visual signature — extreme grain, high contrast, blown highlights, crushed shadows — is partly an aesthetic choice and partly a practical response to the conditions he was working in.
Shooting at night in a city lit by neon and fluorescent light, at speed, without a tripod, requires pushing film hard. Pushed film is grainy film. Moriyama took this technical necessity and made it into a style. The grain is not incidental. It is the record of the conditions.
This is worth understanding because it means his aesthetic cannot be separated from his practice. The look of his photographs is the look of someone moving fast through artificial light in the middle of the night. If you remove those conditions, you get something that looks like Moriyama but is not.
Arebutsu and the Snapshot Aesthetic
Moriyama was associated with the Japanese photography movement known as Provoke, which in the late 1960s developed a deliberately rough, fragmented visual language as a response to the social and political conditions of the time. The term they used was are, bure, boke — rough, blurred, out of focus.
Time of day was central to this. The aesthetic required conditions that produced instability — fast movement, low light, unpredictable subjects. Daylight on a clear day produces stable, legible images. That was not what they were after. They were after the visual equivalent of a city that would not hold still, photographed by someone who was not trying to make it do so.
The hour that produced this most reliably was night. But Moriyama extended it to any hour in which the city was in motion and the light was insufficient. Which, in Shinjuku, was most of them.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
What does your city look like at the hour you have never photographed it? Most photographers have a preferred time. They return to it because it works. Moriyama’s practice suggests that the hour you have avoided is probably the more interesting one.
What does artificial light do to your subject that natural light does not? Neon, fluorescent tubes, the light from a convenience store at 3am — these are not inferior to sunlight. They are different. They produce different colours, different shadows, different intensities. Moriyama built an entire practice on this difference.
Are you moving fast enough? Moriyama’s photographs are made at walking pace or faster, camera at hip or chest height, without a great deal of deliberation. The speed is part of the method. A slow, careful approach to Shinjuku at midnight would produce different photographs. Not better ones.
Using BYgo for Moriyama Conditions
BYgo covers the full range of light conditions including night, artificial light, and the transitional periods that Moriyama worked in extensively — late evening when daylight and artificial light compete, and early morning when the city has not yet switched registers.
If you search a dense urban city and BYgo returns night conditions or the mixed light window around dusk, that is Moriyama’s working environment. The brief will describe what to expect from the light. The rest — the speed, the grain, the refusal to wait for better conditions — is yours to bring.
Further Reading
Farewell Photography (1972) is the foundational text. How I Take Photographs (2019), published by Laurence King, is the most accessible entry point and covers his practice in his own words. Daido Moriyama: The World Through My Eyes collects work across five decades.
Part of the How They Saw It series — exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions. Next: Anders Petersen on Gear & Film.