The History of Japanese Photography

Abstract

The History of Japanese Photography by Anne Wilkes-Tucker, Dans Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryuichi, and Takeba Joe with essays by Iizawa Kotaro and Kinoshita Naoyuki Yale University Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, 2003 / 432 pp. (356 color+ 36 b/w illus.) / $56 (hb) and $50 (sb). The History of Photography is the 406-page catalogue of an exhibition that originated at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and is currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art (until July 27, 2003.) Almost every illustration of this coffee-table size book can be seen on the walls of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The show and catalogue cover a span of 150 years of Japanese photography that only started to develop with the Meiji era, when, following decisions of the new emperor, Meiji, Japan opened itself to the rest of the world and more specifically to European and American influences and commerce. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For the first 100 years, Japanese photography seemed to have emulated western influence; going through successive periods of intense portraiture, pictorialism, and modernism. The founders and developers of Japanese photographic technology were trained in Germany as soon as the 1900s. The real revolution happened after World War II when the industry seriously invested in the 35-mm film and SLR-camera system, and supplanted all its competitors. The baby-boom years of the 1950s and 1960s period was accompanied by an exponential increase in photographic practices. Still influenced by the west, Japanese photography expanded and developed its own identity and masters, including artistic as well as vernacular trends. Only known outside the homeland for a handful of artists in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, Japanese fine-art photography has now achieved a worldwide recognition with such names as Araki, Fukase, Hamaya, Hosoe, Morimura, Shibata, Sugimoto, Tomatsu, Ueda, etc .... The project--exhibition and book--originated with Anne Wilkes-Tucker's realization of the vitality of Japanese photography when, back in 1995, she was a guest-juror at the 1995 Tokyo International Photo Biennale. Along with her colleague, Dana Friis-Hansen, from the Austin Museum of Art, she contacted curators and scholars in Japan (Kaneko Ryuichi, and Takeba Joe) to develop a historical survey of Japanese photography for an American audience, the first of its kind in the USA. The result is an attempt to be concurrently historical, scholarly, critical and entertaining. Thence didactic, and intended to be easily accessible by a diverse audience, both exhibition and book show the same qualities and flaws. …

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