On October 23, Ye—the rapper formerly known as Kanye West—shared a photo of the cover of his upcoming album Bully, his third this year, on Instagram. Later, in typical Ye fashion, he inexplicably deleted the post.

The cover is a photograph of a person grinning, their front teeth blacked out. Black and white, grainy, and high-contrast, the image features all the hallmarks of its celebrated creator, the Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama.

Kanye West, Bully (2024). Photo: @ye on Instagram.

While initially known as a street photographer, his early, almost journalistic documentation of postwar Japanese urban life, often shooting around American military bases, his work gradually became more expressive, experimental, and subjective, introducing high contrast, grainy textures, blurred movements, and other stylistic choices related to Ye’s new album cover.

One of his most famous photographs is Stray Dog, taken in 1971 in the Japanese city of Misawa, where he was shooting his “Searching Journeys” series for Asahi Camera magazine. On the surface, the image is little more than its title: a stray dog turning its lowly head, light and shadow dancing on its unwashed coat of fur. On a more symbolic level, the homeless creature represents Moriyama himself, the wandering photographer.

Installation view of “Daido Moriyama: Printing Show-TKY” at the Aperture Gallery in New York City, 2011. Photo: LAN / Corbis via Getty Images.

“I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time,” he once said of the image. “Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.”

The 86-year-old photographer’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, Osaka’s National Museum of Art, and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, to name just a few examples. Moriyama has also received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the 2012 International Center of Photography Infinity Award and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, which earned him a prize of around $110,000.

Installation view of Daido Moriyama solo exhibition in Central, Hong Kong, 2014. Photo: May Tse / South China Morning Post via Getty Images.

Although it is unclear when the album cover for Bully was commissioned, let alone whether Moriyama produced the photograph especially for Ye, its relevance to the musician body of work is obvious. For one, the blacked out teeth in the photograph are reminiscent of Ye’s own, which, after a car accident in 2002, were replaced by diamond grills, followed by titanium dentures.

However, the connection goes deeper still. According to Italian digital magazine Outpump, the album cover references a traditional Japanese coming-of-age ritual known as ohaguro, in which young women paint their teeth with a solution made from iron, vinegar, and tannin to symbolize them reaching adulthood.

This is significant not only because some of Ye’s most beloved work—including his 2007 album Graduation, whose cover was designed by fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami—is also about the coming of age, but also because Ye himself is currently living in Japan, recording much of Bully inside his Tokyo hotel room with an engineer.