Daido Moriyama Exhibition at Fondation Cartier-Bresson Explores Photography's 'Burn of the Real'

The Fondation Cartier-Bresson is presenting an exhibition devoted to Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, curated by Clément Chéroux under the title 'Lettres d'amour à la photographie' (Love Letters to Photography). The show opened on 20 May and runs until 4 October 2026, coinciding with France's bicentenary celebration of the invention of photography, scheduled from 1 September 2026 to 30 September 2027, though the exhibition does not explicitly claim to be part of it. The display foregrounds Moriyama's saturated blacks, movement, off-kilter framing, relative lack of focus and the urgency of the snapshot, including a rare colour image of a glowing lamp in nocturnal light and a photograph of a burning Austin skyscraper in Texas. A key moment is a reproduction and enlargement of Nicéphore Niépce's first photograph, 'Le point de vue du Gras' (1827), which hung above Moriyama's bed. The exhibition traces Moriyama to Austin, where the Niépce photograph is held at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, and to Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in Burgundy, where Niépce lived and worked; there Moriyama made a series showing Niépce's studio, camera, tools and developing trays. The presentation invokes Walter Benjamin's remark that in photography 'the real has, so to speak, burned the character of the image,' and argues that Moriyama's art values the impression left over the image itself. The show ends on 4 October 2026.