Photography in Japan
The history of Japanese photography is necessarily understood in relation to Western developments, but it is important not to be overwhelmed by the seemingly endless stream of images emanating from Japan. It is also important to decode long-standing Western fantasies about Japanese representation.
Yet the preeminence of Japanese photography in areas such as equipment manufacturing in the second half of the twentieth century and the Japanese love affair with the medium stand as unique features in the history of world photography.
Photography was brought to Japan by Dutch travelers between 1839 and 1840; in other words, photography was introduced to Japan almost from the beginning. In 1848, at the beginning of the Tokugawa period (1848-1868), photographic equipment was mentioned in a document written by a Nagasaki merchant named Toshionojo Ueno. At that time, Nagasaki was the only city where Dutch and Chinese ships were allowed to dock. Soon after, Japan was shaken by violent political and military conflicts, making photographic experimentation difficult.
The first recorded daguerreotype was made by Eliphalet Brown, Jr. in 1854 at the time of the second expedition of Admiral Perry, who was sent by the United States government to enforce trade between Japan and the United States. Brown was commissioned to produce an illustrated report, but unfortunately most of these photographs disappeared in a fire in the United States two years later.
With the Meiji Restoration of 1968, the nation’s capital was moved to Tokyo (renamed from ”Edo”), and for the first time Western ideas and products were freely allowed into Japan. Thus, it is not surprising that the most famous photographers of this period of Japanese photography are Westerners.

Felice Beato, the first European to work in China, took advantage of the growing market for Japanese art in the West and created many delicately hand-colored works published in two albums: Views of Japan with Historical and Descriptive Notes and Native Types. Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz, originally an Austrian painter and a direct competitor of the Italian Beato, set up a studio with a number of Japanese assistants and eventually bought out Beato’s studio. Less well known are the native pioneers of Japanese photography, Hikoma Ueno in Nagasaki, Renjo Shimooka (1823-1914) in Yokohama, and Kimbei Kusakabe (1841-1934). Hikoma Ueno is credited with establishing the first native-owned studio. Kimbei Kusakabe had trained with both Beato and Stillfried and founded his own studio in 1877. It is Renjo Shimooka who is often referred to as the “father of Japanese photography”. Although their studios catered largely to Western tourists, they allowed photography to spread throughout Japanese society. Landscapes proved to be popular subjects in addition to the portraits that were their main trade, and they largely combined Western conventions while enhancing some details with color. Because most of these productions were intended for the Western market, they fulfilled Western expectations of the Land of the Rising Sun as a place of pastoral beauty and elegant, exotic people. The misty mountainscape, the gentle geisha, or the fierce Samuri were popular images.
At the turn of the century, there were well over a hundred photographic studios in Japan, but the expansion of the field was limited by the fact that all photographic equipment had to be imported at great expense, as there were no domestic manufacturers. This situation changed in the early years of the 20th century with the introduction of the Cherry Portable camera in 1903. A forerunner of the Konica, this modest dry plate camera marked the beginning of the Japanese camera industry, which was soon to become a dominant force. The Fujii Lens Seizo-sho factory was founded in 1908, equipped with modern manufacturing equipment imported from Germany and merged in 1917 with Nippon Kogaku Kogyo K.K., a forerunner of Nikon, considered one of the finest camera lines of the twentieth century. For the amateur market, an affordable pocket-sized camera called the Minimum Idea was introduced in 1911. Two years later, the Minimum Photo Club was founded, indicating its great popularity.
During the Meiji era, photography had been associated with the aristocracy and the upper class, both as a patron and as a subject. At the turn of the century, however, newspapers began to publish photographs. The first Japanese photojournalists covered the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905. Important pioneer photographers of this period were Reiji Ezaki and Kenzo Tamoto, who studied with Hikoma Ueno and created the well-known work Ainu Woman Harvesting Seaweed (ca. 1900), which paved the way for a more realistic photographic style.
A great expansion in the field took place during the Taisho era (1912-1926). With the succession of Emperor Taisho to Emperor Meiji, Japan finally came into its own on the international stage. Despite the boom of the Minimal Idea camera, photography was still largely an artistic medium that remained under the influence of painting in the dominant Western style known as Pictorialism. Japanese Pictorialists include: Teiko Shiotani, Hakuyo Fukumori, Ori Umesaka, and Yasuzo Nojima, who, like their Western counterparts Robert Demachy, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Gertrude Kasebier, focused on techniques to enhance texture, create halftones, and soften outlines. In Japan, painting and photography are so closely linked that the term used is shashin-ga, which could be translated as “photographic painting”.
Until 1920, the division of styles common in painting was applied to photography: on the one hand, the nihonga style, or Japanese painting, and on the other, the yoga style, or Western painting. The Fukuhara brothers, Shinzo and Roso, who were a major force in the early days of modern photography in Japan, and Kiyoshi Nishiyama are key figures of this period. They were the first to break through this stylistic divide, combining the spare but atmospheric characteristics of the Nihonga tradition with a clearer pictorial vision, as exemplified by the emerging modernists in the West, such as Paul Strand or Edward Weston.
In 1921, Shinzo Fukuhara, who had traveled and photographed extensively in the West, formed the Shashin-Geijyutsu-sha with his brother Roso and Isao Kakefuda and Motoo Ootaguro, and founded the magazine Shashin Geijutsu (Art Photography).
Shinzo was also the first president of the Japan Photographic Society. These photographers did not completely break away from Pictorialism, as can be seen in Shinzo’s Paris et la Seine, 1922. Roso Fukuhara, however, achieved a more modernist vision in his
vision in his work.
During the 1920s, a number of illustrated news and popular magazines appeared as venues for photography, including Kokusai Shashin Joho, Kokusai Jiji Gappo (later renamed Sekai Jiji Gappo), and Kokusai Gappo. Photography magazines included Geijutsu Shashin Kenkyu, Photo Times, and Amateur.
The first major photography curriculum at the college level, the Konishiroku Shashin Senmon Gakko Photo School, was established in Tokyo. Renamed Tokyo Shashin Senmon Gakko in 1926, the school exists today as Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics. This program joined the existing photography department of Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko (Tokyo Art School), founded in 1915.
The Taisho period also saw a major milestone in the history of Japanese photography with the introduction and subsequent widespread use of the small-format roll-film camera. A leading was the Kodak Vest Pocket, introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1912 and available in Japan around 1915. This camera spawned the Vesu-tan group, which experimented with lens effects and printing techniques that were relatively simple and did not require a professional studio. In 1925, the Konishiroku Honten Company introduced the very popular Pearlette camera as an imitation of the Vest Pocket. The result was a great expansion of amateur photography associated with Japanese practice.
The 1920s also saw the establishment and expansion of numerous photographic clubs and associations. In addition to Shinzo Fukuhara’s Nihon Shashin-kai (Japan Photographic Society), founded in 1924, the Zen-Nihon Shashin Renmei (All-Japan Association of Photographic Societies) emerged from the consolidation of numerous smaller clubs. This organization published the influential magazine Asahi Camera.
Advances in equipment manufacturing continued.
Asahi Kogaku Goshi Kaisha, the forerunner of Asahi Optical Company, Ltd., the maker of Pentax cameras, had been established in Tokyo in 1919 as a manufacturer of optical lenses. By 1934, it had become a major supplier of camera lenses to manufacturers such as Konishiroku and Minolta. The predecessor of Olympus Optical Co., Ltd., Takachiho Seisaku-sho, was also founded in 1919 as a microscope manufacturer. It produced its first photographic lens in 1936. Photographic paper was also widely produced at this time. In 1928, the predecessor of Minolta Camera Company was founded. Along with several other lens manufacturers producing innovative products, Nippon Kogaku Kogyo K.K. produced its first Nikkor lens, which was first mounted on the Hansa Canon camera in 1936.
The predecessor of Canon, Inc. was founded in 1933 as Seiki Kogaku Kenkyusho (Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory), which introduced the Hansa Canon in 1935. In 1934, Fuji Photo Film Company was established. In the same year, the ”Super Olympic,” the first 35mm camera made in Japan, was produced.
In the first half of the 1930s, at the beginning of the Showa period (1926-1989), Japanese photography experienced the impressive growth of the medium that characterized the interwar years in Europe.
Along with the influence of the European avant-gardes, there was the development of press photography or photojournalism and the emergence of modernist design and advertising. Building on the expansion of artistic thought and practice in the 1920s, institutions were in place that could form the basis of an academic movement, a counterculture, and an avant-garde. Photography followed the race for development of Japanese society in general, reflecting the changing conditions and new sensibilities of individuals. During this period, which was marked by two major disasters – the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the devastation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – the medium entered a phase of uneasy coexistence between opposing expressions: traditional painterly realism and experimental practices.
In the 1930s, photography flourished in the illustrated press, inspired in part by the picture stories in Life magazine, which began publication in 1936. Yonosuke Natori was the first Japanese photographer to be published in Life, with his images of Japanese soldiers. The photojournalists, however, were opposed to shinko shashin (new or modern photography), whose adherents mixed pictorialism with aspects of the European avant-garde. Modernism represented a decisive break, a rejection of a pictorialist aesthetic that many Japanese photographers were reluctant to make.
Fueled by technical advances, however, the modern movement included significant experimentation that led artists to discover new possibilities.
Among those who practiced shinko shashin, or new photography, were Kiyoshi Koishi, Nakaji Yasui, Iwata Nakayama, Yasuzo Nojima, and Ihee Kimura, who were particularly influenced by the German New Objectivity movement and the teachings of the Bauhaus schools in Dessau and Berlin. They were able to experience the European avant-garde firsthand through the Film and Photo Exhibition, organized in Stuttgart in 1929 and presented in Tokyo and Osaka in 1931. This exhibition featured the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and many others. The magazine Photo-Times, founded in 1924, had also begun to publish new trends in foreign photography in the 1930s.
The innovations proposed by the Shinko Shashin philosophy were disseminated through three major clubs, each reflecting the personality of its founder: Kiyoshi Koishi with the Naniwa Shashin Club of Osaka, Nakaji Yasui with the Tanpei Shashin Club, and Iwata Nakayama with the Ashiya Camera Club. Another group, Zen’ei Shashin Kyokai (photographic avant-garde), was partly inspired by surrealism. At the same time, the Realist Movement emerged, including Ihee Kimura, Shoji Ueda, Yonosuke Natori, and Hiroshi Hamaya.
An important magazine that supported the expression of the modern photographic movement, Koga published 18 issues between May 1932 and December 1933. The graphic design and typography, as innovative as the photographs that appeared, were published by the magazine’s principals, Yasuzo Nojima, Iwata Nakayama, Nakaji Yasui, and Ihee Kimura. The first issue consisted of a manifesto urging photographers to “shatter the concepts of traditional art”. The work of Koga’s three founders is characteristic of the shinko shashin movement. Nojima, the head of the magazine and the oldest of the three, had practiced a pictorialist style for more than 20 years, as exemplified by the 1910 photograph Troubled Waters. Around 1930, he made a radical shift to experimental forms, as seen in Untitled, Model F of 1931.
While specializing in nudes and portraits, Nojima consistently sought to transcend the rules of these genres. Kimura was the first to use a 35mm Leica to take snapshot-like photographs of the daily lives of Tokyo’s working class. His photographic style is characterized by a floating space, an emphasis on texture that suggests a Zen spirit in the conception of his photographs, as can be seen in Portraits of Literary Artists from 1933. Nakayama had worked in portrait studios in New York and Paris, where he came into contact with so-called “pure photography,” as exemplified by Paul Strand or Albert Renger-Patzsch. When he returned to Japan, he worked with photograms and multiple exposures.
During Koga’s short life, several essays on theoretical and experimental topics were published, further disseminating these ideas among Japanese photographers. The publication ceased in 1933 for financial reasons and because Ihee Kimura decided to pursue photojournalism. The modern or new photography movement revealed the fluidity of Japanese photography in the 1930s. The most important club, the Naniwa Shashin Club, which had been a leader of the Pictorialist style for 20 years, briefly shifted to promoting experimental work.
Several smaller groups in the Kansai area (Osaka and Hyogo) were devoted to experimentation. The Tanpei Shashin Club, founded by Bizan Ueda and Nakaji Yasui in February 1930, attracted Osamu Shiihara and Tershichi Hirai, who practiced styles strongly influenced by German Neue Sachlichkeit. Shoji Ueda, a mainstay of the Naniwa Club, was particularly inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s painting, photography, and film, and was one of the first Japanese photographers to develop a highly personal aesthetic, photographing his family as models in his ongoing Dunes series. Sutezo Otono and Ei-Q (Sugita Hideo) were the first photographers to explore the possibilities of the photogram, a technique developed by Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Ei-Q worked on a sculptural approach to photography, combining painting and photography.
Surrealism was also important in Japan because it gave birth to a new photographic style in the late ’30s. Gingo Hanawa, Yoshio Tarui, and Terushichi Hirai formed the avant-garde group Zoei Shudan. They used techniques such as photograms and multiple exposures and prints to describe imaginary worlds. Gingo Hanawa’s photomontage work, which explored themes of dream and illusion and which he called “Complex Pictures”, is created using a collage technique that allows for a broader definition of photography. With his Hansekai series, Kiyoshi Koishi proved that he had integrated and digested avant-garde techniques and used them as tools to elaborate his own photographic universe.
After 1930, however, Pictorialism continued to exert an attraction on young photographers, carrying the style far beyond its general practice in the West. Sakae Tamura and Giro Takao, two young photographers of the period who had been published in Photo Times, created Pictorialist images that were modeled on Impressionist painting and infused with subjectivity, and were considered works that anticipated Surrealism.
Established figures such as Ihee Kimura, Shoji Ueda, and Yonosuke Natori adopted the visual vocabulary and themes of the German illustrated press in their adaptations of Social Realism, a style practiced in Europe and America especially during the Great Depression. But in the mid-1930s, the Japanese government, marching inexorably toward militarization, took these themes and turned them into fearsome weapons of propaganda in magazines like Front or Nippon. Propaganda, along with a film shortage and a government crackdown on the manufacture or importation of photographic equipment at the start of World War II, severely curtailed photographic production. Censorship was also practiced.
Ken Domon’s protest against censorship, published in Nihon Hyoron in 1943, resulted in the magazine being banned, and thousands of so-called ”compromising negatives” were destroyed in the final months of World War II. The wartime period also saw the consolidation or cessation of publication of many photography magazines as part of the general contraction in the field.
As with every aspect of Japanese life, the dropping of the two atomic bombs by the United States in the final months of the war is an inescapable reality and a turning point for Japanese photography.
The tragedy of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is immortalized in the photographic accounts of the hours and days following the bombings by Yoshito Matsushige and Mitsugi Kishida in Hiroshima
and Army photographer Yosuke Yamahata in Nagasaki, as well as some pictures taken by a young student, Toshio Fukda, Seizo Yamada, and Eiichi Matsumoto. These rare documents gave rise to many reflections on destruction and what history cannot erase. Initially, there was a ban on publishing photographs of the destruction caused by the atomic bomb by the U.S. occupation, which was lifted in 1952. But as late as 1965, Kikuji Kawada published a collection called Bijutsu Shuppansha (Maps), in which he mixed close-ups of stains, bumps, and cracks on the walls of Hiroshima’s atomic dome with images of dead soldiers.
By combining these disparate elements, close-ups of objects, and numerous signs, Kawada evoked Japan’s defeat in World War II. His famous black and white image from this series of the Japanese flag lying on the ground, seemingly soaked and crumpled, is a symbol of an essential part of Japanese history.
The general devastation of World War II, as well as the economic reality of a bankrupt country, also devastated the Japanese photographic equipment industry. Many manufacturers, whose resources had been diverted to the war effort, found it difficult to rebuild in the bleak postwar years. The Nikkor lenses, however, became the lenses of choice for international war correspondents and photojournalists after being introduced to the eminent war photographer David Duncan Douglas, who was in Japan at the time, a step toward the dominance of Japanese photographic equipment in the postwar era.
Photographers attempted to record the horrors of the war while at the same time attempting to rebuild the mental and physical landscape of the country. Ken Domon, who along with Shigeru Tamura and Hiroshi Hamaya had founded the Seinen Hodo Shashin Kenkyukai (Young Documentary Photo Research Club) in 1938 to practice a socially conscious documentary style, published his powerful series Hiroshima in 1958. A work about memory and the inability to completely bury the past, the series was unique in postwar Japanese photography as the country modernized and looked to a future shaped by science and technology.
This embrace of modernity is evident in two events: the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. As part of this process of modernization, in the 1950s and 1960s, Japan discovered Western photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Brassai, Robert Frank, and W. Eugene Smith, who produced some of the most poignant photographs of Japan,
Tomoko Kamimura in Her Bath, 1971, from a series of photographs documenting the catastrophic mercury poisoning caused by a manufacturing plant in the fishing village of Minamata.
In 1950, Ken Domon founded the Shudan Group, which included leading international photojournalists such as Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Bill Brandt. Following the principles of the German “Subjective Photography” movement, the first signs of a revival of photographic subjectivity appeared, while the popularity of the practical applications of photography increased greatly. American-born Yasuhiro Ishimoto, trained by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Chicago Institute of Design, visited Japan in 1953 for a five-year residency, bringing with him the teachings of the New Bauhaus and greatly influencing the emerging postwar generation. He moved to Japan permanently in 1961 and became a Japanese citizen. Ishimoto was the only Japanese artist included in The Family of Man, a major exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, which toured Japan in 1956 and was seen by over a million people.
Postwar Japanese photography developed largely around three axes: documentary photography, personal photography, and commercial photography.
Ken Domon led the movement for documentary forms with an influential essay defining “realist” photography, published as instructions for potential entrants in the monthly competitions of the international magazine Camera, for which he served as a juror. Another important practitioner was Shomei Tomatsu, whose series Nagasaki, 11:02 (the time of the atomic bombing) pays tribute to the survivors of Nagasaki. Ihee Kimura and Hiroshi Hamaya, professional photographers before the war, increasingly saw photography as a medium to discover, capture, and transmit a social reality. Hamaya documented folklore, traditions, and rituals that were in danger of being swept away in the rush toward modernization. Hamaya developed his photographic thinking through two major publications: Yukiguni (Snow Country) in 1956 and Urah Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast) in 1957.
Inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s philosophy of the ”decisive moment,” Ihee Kimura continued his snapshot aesthetic by documenting the average Japanese citizen on the street, at work, or engaged in other aspects of everyday life. Kimura’s importance to Japanese postwar photographic history is reflected in the naming of a prestigious prize awarded annually by Asahi Camera magazine.
Relationships to history, the history of a place, religious experience, and the construction of bonds that unite people and their divinities are also found in the photography of Yoshio Watanabe. A leading architectural photographer, he was authorized in 1953 to photograph the ritual of demolition and reconstruction of the Ise Jingu Shrine, an ancient wooden Shinto temple in Mie Prefecture, which takes place every 20 years. Documenting this rebuilding was a milestone for both Watanabe and Japanese photography.
Personal photography is based on the I-novel and on the idea that photography can become an individual expression, a notion that came late to Japan. These photographers were younger and emerged as professionals after the war. The most representative Daido Moriyama, who was influenced by William Klein; Nobuyoshi Araki, who first used and popularized the term “photography”; and Masahisa Fukase, who made series on loneliness and madness, such as the Yoko series, 1964-1975. Other postwar figures, such as Eikoh Hosoe and Ikko Narahara (also known simply as ”Ikko”), explored other personal paths.
In his 1956 series Man and His Land, Ikko drew a parallel between two communities: the small village of Kurogami on the island of Kyushu, destroyed by an erupting volcano, and the artificial island of Hajima, built around a coal mine. The photographs presented a pessimistic view in which man is subject to both the hostility of nature and social oppression. Ikko continued to work with the photo essay form, but in the 1970s and 1980s expanded his practice to include other experimental art media. Eikoh Hosoe dramatized the relationship between himself and a young American girl he met on a base while trying to improve his English in the photo narrative An American Girl in Tokyo (1956), using a photojournalistic technique to create a work of fiction. Hosoe was hardly the only Japanese photographer to grapple with the implications of the U.S. occupation of Japan, which officially ended in 1952 but saw U.S. troops stationed on Japanese soil until the end of the century. Shomei Tomatsu, who established himself as one of Japan’s leading postwar artists with his 1958 series Chewing Gum and Chocolate, documented the preoccupation of Japanese people to save their traditions and culture from Americanization.
From 1957 to 1959, the critic Tatsuo Fukushima organized groundbreaking exhibitions called Junin no me, which means ”The Eyes of Ten People.” The ten exhibitors were Eikoh Hosoe, Yashuhiro Ishimoto, Kikuji Kawada, Shun Kawahara, Ikko Narahara, Masaya Nakamura, Akiro Sato, Akira Tanno, Shomei Tomatsu, and Toyoko Tokiwa. Six of these colleagues, Hosoe, Kawada, Narahara, Sato, Tanno, and Tomatsu, founded the important agency VIVO to support and promote their style of photojournalism while pursuing their personal work.
Significant advances in photographic technology continued as Japanese manufacturers innovated and improved their products. By 1962, Japan had surpassed West Germany as the world’s leading camera manufacturer. In the early 1960s, the Nikonos camera was introduced, the first underwater camera that did not require a bulky housing. The Pentax SP was introduced in 1964 as the first SLR with a through-the-lens exposure system, which would soon become standard on SLRs. The following year, the first Japanese cameras with electronic shutters were introduced, and Canon created the world’s first camera with a quick-load function for 35mm film, which would also become standard.
In the second half of the 1960s, a new generation of artists, including Daido Moriyama, Hiromi Tsuchida, Yutaka Takanashi, Masahisa Fukase, and Issei Suda, challenged the concept of modern art, which was based on the creation of an original world inspired by the personality and aesthetic sense of the artist. In November 1968, Yutaka Takanashi, Takuma Nakahira, Koji Taki, and Takahiho Okada published the magazine Provoke. The images of these photographers are characterized by a fragmentation without any aesthetic order and by violently contrasting images. Although Provoke was very short-lived, publishing only three issues with a circulation that never exceeded 1,000 copies, it became a seminal work of postwar Japanese photography. Indeed, Provoke carried with it radical photographic theory and unpolished images described by photography historian Anne Wilkes Tucker as are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, unfocused).
Nobuyoshi Araki first emerged as a major force in Japanese photography when he won the first and now prestigious Taiyo-sho Award in 1961. A photo essay called Satchin, which followed children on the streets of Tokyo, was the first in an almost continuous documentation of everything that comes before Araki’s lens, including subject matter that many consider to go beyond the erotic into the pornographic, making him a prototypical figure of Japanese photography in the West.
For most of the postwar period, nudity in photography was considered offensive, and the government banned the depiction of pubic hair, to the point that officials confiscated nude photographs by Edward Weston that were scheduled for an exhibition in 1976. Kishin Shinoyama was one of the few Japanese to fully explore the genre, with his 1969 series Death Valley, Twin, and Brown Lily. The Death Valley nudes are striking abstractions of the body set against the dramatic landscape of the famous California desert. Shinoyama also made a name for himself with a collection of photographs of Yukio Mishima. In September 1970, before his suicide by hara-kiri, which became an international event, the novelist posed for Shinoyama and acted out his ideas for his own death for the camera. Two pictures in particular became famous: the first shows Mishima’s transformation into a Saint Sebastian motif, his wrists tied to the branch of a tree while arrows pierce his side and armpit. In the second, Mishima lies on the ground with a short saber in his abdomen, while the photographer stands behind him with a longer saber, waiting for a signal to behead Mishima.
Mishima claimed to be protesting the loss of values in Japanese society to the advances of technology and capitalism. These images, like those in Eikoh Hosoe’s 1963 collection Barakei (Killed by Roses), once again questioned modern Japanese history and its relationship to Western art history.
With the beginning of the Heishi period in 1989, with the death of Emperor Hirohito and the succession of Emperor Akihito, Japan experienced a severe domestic recession, which led to the closure of several magazines and art galleries.
A new generation of Japanese photographers had emerged to address international artistic issues and gain international recognition while remaining true to the deep traditions of Japanese photography. Yasumasa Morimura became internationally known with works that explored these themes. In large-scale color paintings, Morimura used himself in costume and makeup to imitate the great paintings of Western art history, such as Daughter of Art History: Princess A, from 1990, which is inspired by Velasquez’s 1656 portrait of the Infante Margarita. Morimura also made a self-portrait, Doublonnage (Marcel) (1988), in which he portrays himself as a new Rrose Sélavy, the portrait of the French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp in the guise of his female alter ego, immortalized by Man Ray in 1920-21. Although Morimura works within the postmodern precepts of the late twentieth century, his method creates a continuity between painting and photography, an important issue at the turn of the twentieth century.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, another internationally renowned figure, has been meditating on time and space since 1978. Using a wooden cabinet, a 10-inch Durdorf and Sons view camera, and long exposures modulated by filters to produce a film speed comparable to that of nineteenth-century films, Sugimoto’s images contain an unsettling poetry that was initially collected more by those in the West than in Japan. Photographing the elaborate American movie palaces of the 1920s and 1930s, drive-in theaters, natural history museums, wax museums, and seas and oceans in ongoing series, the Zen spirit that pervades Sugimoto’s work seems uniquely Japanese.
Toshio Shabata is another quintessential Japanese photographer who has made a name for himself in the West with his extraordinary, large-scale landscape studies, often depicting the earth confined or otherwise disrupted by human engineering. His 1999 exhibition Quintessence of Japan established his reputation as one of Japan’s leading contemporary photographers.
Historically, Japanese photographers have been almost exclusively male; in the 1980s and 1990s, young Japanese women began to emerge as creative forces, most notably Mariko Mori. Like her colleague Yasumasa Morimura, identity is one of Mori’s favorite subjects. She also incorporates elements of Shintoist Buddhism into her photographic compositions (Mirror of the Water, 1996; Pure Land, Entropy of Love and Burning Desire, 1998). She often portrays herself as a kind of hybrid creature of man and machine, a figure perhaps stemming from the manga and anime forms so popular in Japan during these years. Mori is also a technical innovator, working with holographic images and three-dimensional video. Beginning of the End, a project that combines space and time. At each stop on her extensive travels, the artist takes photographs with a 360-degree camera, with herself in the center of the image, held in a transparent capsule. Consisting of 13 panoramic images, Beginning of the End is divided into three groups representing the past (Angkor, Teotihuacán, La Paz, Bolivia, Gizeh), the present (Times Square in New York, Shibuya in Tokyo, Piccadilly Circus in London, and Hong Kong), and the future (represented by ambitious development projects La Défense in Paris, the city of Shanghai, London’s Docklands, Odaiba in Tokyo, and the post-Cold War construction boom in Berlin).
High school student Hiromix (Toshikawa Hiromi) became a phenomenon in Japan with her Nobuyoshi Araki-inspired photo-diary style, as young women increasingly influenced the creation and consumption of photographs.
The 1998 exhibition An Incomplete History, which attempted to capture the history of women photographers in the medium’s 130-year history, began a two-year tour of the United States. It featured nine photographers, most of whom had been largely overlooked, including Eiko Yamazawa, Osaka’s first female photographer, who ran her own studio from the 1930s to the 1950s; Tsuneko Sasamoto, known as Japan’s first female documentary photographer; Miyako Ishiuchi, who made a groundbreaking series of male nudes; and Michiko Kon, a younger artist known for her still lifes.
In the 1990s, Japanese photography became more institutionalized, with the opening of the permanent Toyko Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the founding of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts and the Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography, and numerous other photography programs. The widespread use of disposable cameras and other easy-to-use devices, such as the autofocus camera developed in Japan, further cemented the longstanding fascination with the medium. Photography entered the digital age with the manufacture of products that further expanded amateur use, such as camera phones, automatic vending machines that dispensed photo stickers, which spawned the Print Club (Purinto Kurabu) craze, and other devices, while the Internet enabled almost instantaneous distribution of images.