[Three Boys]

Grainy, off-kilter, and overexposed, the style of Daido Moriyama’s photograph is just as unsettling as the three boys pictured in it. Beginning in the late 1960s, Moriyama embraced the hand-held camera and high contrast black-and-white film. Photographing in the streets of Japan, he documented its radical, postwar transformation, indifferent to technical and compositional niceties. In 1968, the year this photograph was taken, Moriyama co-founded Provoke, a short-lived magazine that came to define an entire movement of mid-century Japanese photography.