[1] Having studied graphic design at Tama Art University[2] in Tokyo, he taught himself photography and began as an architectural journalist for magazines and newspapers.

[3] Inspired by the landscapes of post-war Japan that marked his childhood [4] he came to reckon the imagery of destruction when he received a commission from Asahi Graph (pictorial journal) to document the demolition of the Nakano Prison in Tokyo.

These images were later used as a basis for criticism of reconstruction methods that obscure the memory of the disaster [9] and resulted in his selection for the Japanese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1996 by Arata Isozaki, known for his discourse on ruins.

His photographs exposes the ideology of progress in modern urban development, by uncovering its relation to heritage preservation, disasters, social downgrading, and informal lifestyles.

He remembers his neighborhood, Toyama Heights in Shin-Okubo, Shinjuku as a "hilly area with municipal housing projects and elementary schools curiously interspersed among concrete ruins", that he considers as a typical view of Tokyo in the years just after World War II had ended.

Inconvenient old buildings were replaced with astounding speed; there was no time for them even to fall into decay.Miyamoto studied at the Tama Art University and graduated from the graphic design department in 1973.

Miyamoto’s approach is indebted to his early years working as an architectural photographer, a field dominated by the so-called objective style of reportage photography (hōdō shashin).

Light passing though a lens or pinhole burns an image on photosensitive material kept in a dark space, fixing a set view of the world.

As the dark underside of the city grows still deeper and darker, I'm sure we won't run out of further encounters between light and whatever photosensitive apparatus.Beginning with Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Architectural Apocalypse documents the final days of historic early-twentieth-century buildings, traces of the past that had been deemed inefficient, out of place, and unnecessary in the globalizing metropolis.

The buildings that Miyamoto photographed in the midst of their demolition represent a range of industries geared towards popular entertainment, such as cinemas, breweries, department stores, and the remnants of international expos.

Hayashi describes these buildings as “significant gathering places for the masses in the modern city, spaces of pleasure where they enjoyed themselves while dreaming utopian dreams.” [21] In 1988, Miyamoto compiled his images of “temporary ruins” into a photobook provocatively entitled Kenchiku no mokushiroku (Architectural Apocalypse).

Miyamoto was marked on this occasion by the poor housing area of Motomachi - known as the "genbaku slum" - a consequence of the temporary barracks construction after the 1945 atomic bomb.

Or, it is the chaotic street corners covered in acid rain from the movie Blade Runner, which is said to depict the most realistic prediction of the future city.Most of the photographs that Miyamoto initially published of Kowloon are made up of these alleyways, revealing perspectives and sightlines that are continually cut off by the circuitous routes that delineate the Walled City.

[28] He also photographed the conglomeration of cramped apartments, the illegal cages terraces, signboards, dentists offices and the informal networks of cables and pipes.

He defined these cardboard houses as archetypal human dwellings, made by "hunter-gathers" of the contemporary city :Tacked together out of scavenged refuse materials commonly discarded in all big cities cardboard boxes, scraps of wood, polystyrene packs, mattresses, plastic tarps, umbrellas these dwellings attest to the consummate skill of their builders, persons alienated from both society and family working today in exactly the same mode as humans in primeaeval times who gathered their own materials to build their own shelters in the wild.

Existing within the contemporary city whose every spatial assignation is determined by economics and politics, they stand wholly apart from considerations of efficiency and power.

[32] Miyamoto continued photographing the homes of the homeless for another nine years, and, in 2003, he published the images in a photobook plainly titled Cardboard Houses.

In an exhibition at Akiyama Gallery in Tokyo in 2000, he constructed six pinhole houses and displayed the photographs inside the structures as they would have appeared at the time of their creation.

In the first few days after the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, Miyamoto was encouraged by an acquaintance in publishing, Suzuki Akira, to journey to the disaster zone and photograph the city of Kobe.

He traversed the city with a large-format 4x5 camera and set up his tripod to photograph the exteriors of buildings, streets filled with debris, and overturned trains in an attempt to create a “total survey” (maru de sokuryō) of the disaster.

[42] According to Miyamoto, just one year after the earthquake Kobe “had really been cleaned up and any traces of the disaster were miraculously gone.” For him, “This is the power of photographs – that you can still try and convey what it was like to people who did not have direct contact with the scene.” [43] The ruins of Miyamoto’s photographs worked in conjunction with other media representations to serve simultaneously as a symbol of the fractured lives of survivors, as a source for the critique of productivist narratives of recovery, and as guidance for future conceptions of the city.