Born 1938 in Osaka. As his father was repeatedly transferred to different offices, he grew up at various places, and dropped out of high school at the age of 17. While working in commercial design, he aspired to become a photographer, and eventually entered Takeji Iwamiya's studio to study the basics of photography in 1959.

In 1961 he went to Tokyo, driven by his desire to work for the VIVO photo agency that had been jointly set up by Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe and Ikko Narahara. However, as VIVO was already about to dissolve, he was unable to join, and instead began to work as Eikoh Hosoe's assistant. His valuable experiences during the next three years included joining Hosoe for the shooting of the well-known "Barakei" portraits of Yukio Mishima, and being responsible for darkroom work on the series.

He married and went independent as a photographer in 1964, publishing works in "Camera Mainichi" and "Asahi Camera". In '67, he received the Newcomer's Award from the Photographic Society of Japan. In the following year, he spearheaded the so-called "jittery, rough and blurry" avant-garde photography, and published "Nippon Gekijo Shashincho (Japan – A Photo Theater)", heralding a personal style of photography that was neither journalistic nor commercial.

In 1968, he joined Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki and Takahiko Okada for the photography fanzine "Provoke", and was involved in the publication from the second issue. In 1972, his photo collections "Hunter" and "Farewell Photography" were published, but after the publication of the latter he fell into a prolonged slump. It was with the start of the publication of the "Light and Shadow" series in "Shashin Jidai" magazine in 1983 that he found his own answer to the question, "What is photography?", and returned to his daily shooting routine. The results were collected in the acclaimed "Light and Shadow" series that eventually received an annual award at the Photographic Society of Japan.

Following the regeneration of his own photography style during the 1980s, in the '90s he published the "Daido Hysteric" series. This "trilogy" has been described as the series in which Daido Moriyama finally established his unique style of roaming the streets and photographing what he sees. In 1999, a solo show at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art kicked off a two-year tour of Daido Moriyama's retrospective exhibition all around the USA. Following in 2003 was a solo show at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, and a string of large-scale exhibitions in various countries.

In 2012, the exhibition "William Klein + Daido Moriyama" was held at Tate Modern, presenting contemporary urban lifestyles in New York and Tokyo through photographs of both cities.

In early 2013, "View from the Laboratory" was published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha, the photos of which were printed by master printer Motoyuki Kubo at the top international level platinum printing facilities of amanasalto in Tokyo. The expressionistic style of "jittery, rough and blurry" art expressed through particles has been exerting an enormous impact especially on the next generation of photographers, making Daido Moriyama one Japanese representative photographer who has come to be highly valued again recently.