Reflecting on modern Japan: Photobooks from the post-war
period
Asahi Shimbun displays
Room 3
5 June - 10 August 2008
Admission free
This new display presents three photobooks by
leading Japanese photographers of the post-war period, Tōmatsu
Shōmei (born 1930), Hosoe Eikoh (born 1933) and Homma Takashi (born
1962). The images in the photobooks are juxtaposed with contextual
images from the archives of The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s leading
newspaper. Together they are used to explore some key issues of
life in post-war and contemporary Japan: Defeat and Reconstruction,
Freeing the Self, and Tokyo Now and in the Future. Similar themes –
and many more besides – are also featured in the Museum’s
Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries (Rooms 92-94), as part of
a major recent renovation of the displays, entitled Japan
from prehistory to the present.
Photobooks are, essentially, essays in images.
A carefully orchestrated sequence of photographs bound between the
covers of a book, they have also been described as existing halfway
between the novel and film. The genre is by no means limited to
Japan, as recent studies by UK photographer Martin Parr and others
have shown (The Photobook: A History, London 2004).
Nevertheless, the sheer quantity and interest of the phenomenon in
that country is remarkable. Without doubt, modern Japanese
photobooks continue important elements of the traditions of popular
colour woodblock prints and illustrated books of the so-called
‘floating world’ (Ukiyo-e) school of the Edo period (1600-1868) and
Meiji era (1868-1912).
In 2007 the British Museum acquired a major
collection of more than two hundred post-war Japanese photobooks,
by masters of photography from Kimura Ihei (1901-74) to Araki
Nobuyoshi (born 1940). The stylish look and feel of many of the
books, full of ‘60s or ‘70s period flavour, is often the work of
leading designers such as Tanaka Ikkō (1930-2002), who famously
also designed the posters for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In the tough
decades following the Asia-Pacific war of 1937-45, when there were
very few galleries to present the work of photographers, photobooks
were a medium which enabled artists to reach and cultivate a mass
audience for their work.
The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in August 1945 were a defining element in the creation of a modern
Japanese psyche. They brought the nightmare conflict of the
Asia-Pacific war to a sudden, horrific end. Hiroshima-Nagasaki
Document 1961 by Domon Ken (1909-90) and Tōmatsu Shōmei took
the documentary style of photography of the immediate post-war
years and applied it to the living torture of some of the
survivors. Glass bottles fused and distorted by the Nagasaki blast
serve as an eloquent and poignant substitute for the unbearably
damaged human bodies recorded in other images in the book.
As in many other countries, the 1960s was an
era in Japan of radical politics and radical counterculture
experimentation. One manifestation was a new ‘anti-ballet’ dance
movement called ‘Butoh’. Kamaitachi (1969)
by photographer Hosoe Eikoh followed the leading Butoh exponent
Hijikata Tatsumi (1928-86) back to his native Akita
districthe rural north of Japan. Hosoe’s radical camera recorded
Hijikata’s extraordinary antics in the landscape and interactions
with villagers. Sometimes there is comedy, but more often the mood
is sinister and unsettling, in keeping with the dark
‘Sickle-Weasel’ folk legend that inspired this ‘legendary’
collaboration between performer and photographer.
Tokyo is a city of twelve million, with more
than twenty million in the surrounding area, and it is growing.
Much of the collective experience of contemporary Japan is played
out there. TokyoSuburbia (1998) by Homma Takashi is a
thought-provoking collection that won the young photographer the
prestigious Kimura Ihei prize. Pictures of newly built – but eerily
empty – dormitory suburbs alternate with candid images of the kids
and adults who live there. Homma’s photographs leave us reflecting
on the strange artifice of our urban environments and questioning
what sort of life is possible in them.
For further information or images please
contact Katrina Whenham +44 (0)20 7323 8583 or kwhenham@britishmuseum.org