Spotting an alleyway just ahead, Daido Moriyama breaks into a run as if already anticipating what lies in wait. Over and over, he halts abruptly, standing still as he presses the shutter. Always alert, his eyes scan the surroundings, his lens capturing anything that catches his attention. At times, he keeps the camera at chest level, pressing the shutter continuously and firing a rapid series of shots without even looking through the viewfinder. It's not uncommon for him to burn through an entire roll of film—36 frames—in less than a hundred metres, stopping multiple times to reload, swapping rolls in seconds.

At this moment, Journalist Takaeshi Nakamoto is at his wits' end, struggling to keep pace with Moriyama during a photo walk along the Sunamachi Ginza shopping arcade in Tokyo's Koto City. He's attempting to document the experience for a book on Moriyama's street photography methods. 

I visited the Daido Moriyama retrospective at The Photographers' Gallery in Soho, London, earlier this year. The sheer volume of work on display highlighted the relentless nature of his practice. The exhibition's accompanying text positioned Moriyama in a familiar narrative, presenting him as the maverick who redefined street photography. After the show, I picked up Nakamoto's book, How I Take Photographs. It sheds light on the intense, frenetic style of image-making Moriyama has pursued continuously since the 1960s and includes a series of insightful remarks. 

He dismisses traditional photographic techniques and ideals of beauty, offering advice such as this to aspiring photographers:

Forget everything you've learned on the subject of photography for the moment, and just shoot. Take photographs - of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don't pause to think.

In keeping with this ethos, the camera that Takaeshi Nakamoto sees Moriyama constantly reloading along Sunamachi Ginza is a simple compact point-and-shoot. Japan's most celebrated street photographer does not rely on a professional-grade camera with interchangeable lenses. He explains to Nakamoto:

Think about it. If you've got an SLR or a large-format camera in your hand, you inevitably want to take considered shots. You think about the composition, and so on. With a compact camera, you just point and shoot … I've always said it doesn't matter what kind of camera you're using, a toy camera, a polaroid camera, or whatever – just as long as it does what a camera has to do.

Later in his career, Moriyama embraced digital photography despite criticism from longtime fans who believed film was fundamental to his style. But, of course, Moriyama didn't care. At that point, he opted for a low-cost digital compact camera. I remember feeling a constant frustration with this type of camera when they first became popular—not due to any resistance to digitalisation, but because the images they produced felt hard-edged, compressed, and devoid of any sense of romance.

Modern smartphone cameras are designed to produce increasingly smooth, pristine images, which has led to a resurgence in digital compact cameras. This resurgence seems fuelled by nostalgia and a desire to disconnect from smartphones, reviving the grunge of Y2K-era photography. As time has passed and technology has advanced, the once unforgiving, hard-edged compression of digital snapshots has acquired that missing sense of romance. Moriyama's practical approach to camera choice has rendered his work timeless, not that he would have planned it that way. Nevertheless, he remains an artist who continues to do things his way, unaffected by the cycles of technological innovation and the revival of past trends.

Since I began taking photographs, I've occasionally been asked about the camera and lenses I use. Since launching Tokyothèque—though I don't consider photography to be at its core—the camera question has become the most frequent query in my DMs. What struck me most about the Moriyama exhibition and reading the accompanying book is how his perspective on this aligns with my own. Not being particularly technical regarding cameras and processes, I had long thought of myself as not a photographer. Moriyama's views prompted a change of heart—perhaps a sense of vindication—and a feeling of sympathy, tinged with sadness, for my younger, less confident self.

In 2010, during the summer before moving to Japan, I worked through Yasujirō Ozu's back catalogue of films. I admired his storytelling, particularly his use of ellipses—leaving major events off-screen—to highlight emotional undercurrents over explicit action. But what resonated with me most was the cinematography. Ozu's compositions avoid dramatic angles or sweeping camera movements, opting instead for planimetric framing, where elements are flattened and aligned parallel to the picture plane. His mise-en-scène—the arrangement and design of the scene—is presented squarely, emphasising vertical and horizontal lines, creating a serene, almost static beauty in each frame. This style, rooted in Japanese art history, continues to influence contemporary filmmakers like Beat Takeshi and Naomi Kawase, whose work has made a strong impression on me.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, I felt inspired to experiment with this aesthetic on the city's streets. My camera, not a deliberate choice but simply what I had on hand, was an iPhone 4. With it, I framed planimetric shots of vending machines, walls covered in ventilation fans, deserted playgrounds with melancholy equipment, and konbini facades. Expanding my focus to the entrances of shopping arcades and the narrow confines of yokochō alleyways and residential lanes, I began spotting mini urban tableaux everywhere. Tokyo's buildings, spaces, and urban landscapes lend themselves well to this approach, shaped by the deliberate sensibility behind their arrangement. If you appreciate such details, getting anywhere in the city is almost impossible, endlessly distracted by the next contemplatively positioned post box.