Daido Moriyama has been at the forefront of Japanese photography since the start of his career in the late 1960s. His work is characterized by continual experimentation and exploration, searching for new means and fresh approaches to extending the potential of the photographic practice. As a result, Moriyama‘s oeuvre—apart from his photographic prints—is comprised of numerous volumes of writings, experiments and collaborations in publishing, mostly notably Provoke, teaching/workshop activities that have helped to galvanize a new era for photography in Japan, and a vast number of his photobooks, many of which number amongst the seminal books of postwar Japanese photography.

ACCIDENT takes the photobook and edges it closer to the artist‘s multiple. The individual spreads of the book are silk-screened prints that have been affixed together and folded to form an accordion that is 20 meters in length when fully extended. The choice of printing the entirety of the book in silk screen is meant to give the images a materiality through the reproduction process, underscoring the larger ideas of this early body of Moriyama‘s work. ACCIDENT as a photographic series was created for a column running monthly in 1969 in the magazine Asahi Camera. The publication of ACCIDENT is the first time this series has been realized as a bookwork.

Moriyama Daido has been publishing and exhibiting his photography since the late 1960s. A major retrospective, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, originated in 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and subsequently toured internationally to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Japan Society in New York, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and numerous other venues. He is a recipient of The Cultural Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie. Forthcoming exhibitions include a major retrospective, On the Road, to be presented at the Osaka National Museum of Art from June to October 2011, and William Klein/Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern from October 2012 to January 2013.