CategoriesStyles and Movements
Japanese Photography
Photography in Japan from its arrival in the mid-1800s to the grainy postwar avant-garde, the photobook and conceptual work today.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
The first cameras arrived in Nagasaki through Dutch traders in the late 1840s, and photography spread once Japan's ports opened in the 1850s. By the 1860s Felice Beato in Yokohama and Japanese photographers such as Ueno Hikoma in Nagasaki were selling hand-coloured views and portraits. Early 20th-century amateur clubs embraced soft-focus Pictorialism, and in the 1930s modernists absorbed New Vision and Surrealist ideas.
Defeat in 1945 and the American occupation shaped a new generation. Shōmei Tōmatsu photographed Nagasaki survivors and US bases, and Eikoh Hosoe made the theatrical Ordeal by Roses (1963) with the writer Yukio Mishima. The short-lived magazine Provoke (1968–69) championed grainy, blurred, tilted images, a style Daidō Moriyama pushed hardest. The photobook became a central form. Nobuyoshi Araki made diaristic, often erotic work, Miyako Ishiuchi photographed her home town and later her mother's belongings, and Hiroshi Sugimoto's long-exposure seascapes and cinema interiors took a meditative, conceptual route.
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