His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze.

[4]: 207 As a young man coming of age in 1950s and '60s, Moriyama bore witness to the political unrest (illustrated most vividly in the 1960 Anpo protests), economic revival and mass consumerism, and radical art-making that characterized the two decades following the end of World War II.

His first photobook, Nippon gekijō shashinchō (にっぽん劇場写真帖, Japan: A Photo Theater), published in 1968, captures the excitement, tension, anxiety, and rage of urban life during this critical historical juncture through a collection of images, indiscriminate in subject matter, presented in dizzying succession through full-page spreads.

The photographs range from ordinary streetscapes featuring blurred faces and garish signage to snapshots alluding to the aggressive redevelopment taking place in Tokyo and the rubble left in its wake, as well as images of nightlife and darker elements of urban life.

[9] In 1965, a series of photographs of preserved human embryos, titled Mugon geki ("silent theatre", Pantomime), by Moriyama were published in the magazine Gendai no me and caught the attention of avant-garde poet Shūji Terayama.

[10] Moriyama is widely recognized for his work associated with the short-lived but deeply influential magazine, which was founded by photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanishi, along with critic Kōji Taki and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968.

[11][12]: 243  These visions of everyday life rejected the notion that photography captures a lucid reflection of the world undergirded by a legible ideological argument; rather, they sought to emphasize the fragmentary nature of reality and make evident the photographer's prowling, wandering gaze.

Though the collective only produced three issues and a book, First, Abandon the World of Pseudocertainty – Thoughts on Photography and Language (1970), each member continued to publicize their work in close relation to the "era of Provoke," and the magazine has had an immense cultural impact and been the subject of numerous international exhibitions.

"[8]: 275 Published in April 1972, Shashin yo sayōnara ("Farewell Photography") emerged within the context of Japan's aggressive cultural and economic revival—best exemplified in the creative sphere by Expo '70—and continued suppression of left-wing politics, as illustrated by the failure of the 1970 Anpo protests and the subsequent renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty.

[17] Many of the scenes were captured by Moriyama as he drove past them, made evident by the skewed angles, blurry, moving figures, and fragments of road infrastructure that cut across the picture plane.

At the same time, the volume maintains a certain open-endedness in its format, lacking any sort of narrative resolution that might typically accompany the trope of a road trip or a hunting excursion, and instead putting forth a sensation of perpetual anxiety and uncertainty through its succession of consistently detached and irresolvable images of subjects and scenes across Japan.

[24][19] Instead, his approach takes into account the futility of the medium in reproducing the reality of his surroundings, the inherently fragmentary nature of the world, and the indelible presence of the photographer in all images, lurking or haunting the sphere of his subjects.

Influences cited by Moriyama include Seiryū Inoue, Eikoh Hosoe, Shōmei Tōmatsu,[25] William Klein, Andy Warhol,[26] Yukio Mishima, and Shūji Terayama.

The photographer cites Shinjuku's shadowy, labyrinthine streets and alleys as a source of inspiration and allure, describing the area as having "a strange narcotic effect...something about it that traps me and puts me under a spell.

"[28] Moriyama predominantly presents his work in the form of photobooks (and self-published photo magazines), which he describes as open-ended sites, allowing the reader to decide on the sequence of images that they view.

[8]: 281 Due to his tendency to take a large number of shots when photographing, Moriyama finds the digital format more amenable to his needs, and rejects critics who fixate on the preciousness of film photography.

With the series called Pantomime he had his debut in 1968 together with Shin Yanagisawa at Ginza Nikon Salon in Tokyo where he was exhibited again several times over the following years, while he showed his work at the Image Shop Camp, too.

)[36] Moriyama rose to prominence in the States after being heavily featured in the landmark group exhibition New Japanese Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, curated by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi.

[39] It was followed in 2003 by a retrospective that travelled through Japan and a first exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, where a follow-up was organized in 2016 (Daido Tokyo), for which he was commissioned to create an "immersive" multiscreen projection of black-and-white photographs (Dog and Mesh Tights).