Photography

Kimura Ihei (1901–1974) took up the small Leica camera from 1930 and, without staging, caught the everyday life of people in Tokyo's shitamachi and around Ginza; after the war he led the realism photography movement together with Domon Ken. In Japan, photographs of people taken in a relaxed, everyday state, not posing for the camera, are called snapshots. The Kimura Ihei Award, founded by the Asahi Shimbun in 1975, goes to a newcomer for work published that year in photobooks, exhibitions, magazines, and other media, and is sometimes called the “Akutagawa Prize of photography.” A photobook is a set of tens to hundreds of photographs edited around a concept; Talbot's The Pencil of Nature is named as the beginning of reproducible books gathering several photographs, and a copy is in the collection of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Photographers also photograph themselves: Katayama Mari starts from hand-sewn objects and develops them into self-portraits, video, and installations. On labels, a gelatin silver print is the most common process in black-and-white photography.

Look at the photographs on a wall one by one, in order, then step back and see them together: what story does the arrangement tell that no single picture does?

Is this photograph meant to be seen alone, or read together with the ones before and after it?