Various artistic trends originating in Europe after World War 1, such as Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus in Germany and Surrealism in France, left a strong impression on Japanese art and photography in the Taisho and the early Showa periods. In photography in particular, the Western influence brought a new movement called Shinko Shashin (New Photography) in the early Showa period. This exhibition was an attempt at reexamining the visual expression in the period from the perspective of the photographic work of artists from fields other than photography, focusing on the work of Koshiro Onchi, Osamu Shiihara and Ei-Q.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

A pictorial record of the exhibition Japanese Photography 1930s, at Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1988, which collects photographs from the emerging photography of the era. Approximately 340 illustrations of the work of photographers such as Kiyoshi Koishi, Shoji Ueda, Ei-Q, Koshiro Onchi, Nakaji Yasui, Iwata Nakayama, Shinzō Fukuhara, Kineo Kuwabara, Terushichi Hirai amongst others.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

A pictorial record of the exhibition Japanese Photography 1930s, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1988, which collects photographs from the emerging photography of the era. Approximately 340 illustrations of the work of photographers such as Kiyoshi Koishi, Shoji Ueda, Ei-Q, Koshiro Onchi, Nakaji Yasui, Iwata Nakayama, Shinzō Fukuhara, Kineo Kuwabara, Terushichi Hirai amongst others.

Iwata Nakayama (1895-1949) is regarded as a one of the most important contributors to the Shinko Shashin movement. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1918, he received a scholarship from the Japanese government and went to California before settling in New York. At the same time Nakayama was attracted to avant-garde movements and moved in bohemian circles where he met Shimizu Toshi. Shimizu encouraged him to move to Paris in 1926 where he met Man Ray, Fujita Tsuguji, and Enrico Prompolini. These encounters left a deep impression on him and when he returned to Japan in 1927 he energetically set about forming his own vision of ‘pure art photography’. In 1929 he settled in Ashiya (nr. Kobe) and in the following year founded the Ashiya Camera Club with Hanaya Kambei, Korai Seiji, and others. This club became the main driving force of New Photography in Japan. Together with Kimura and Nojima he founded Koga magazine in 1932 that was the most important forum for artistic photography at the time.

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorial worlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out and compellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographic processes. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book, Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to the pictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibition settings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, the Venice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.

The plates of the present is a project based on the photographic process of photogram. In February 2013, artist Thomas Fougeirol and artist/curator Jo-ey Tang set up a photographic darkroom(nicknamed DUST) in Ivry-sur-Seine, bordering Paris. Since then, 130 participants have come through The plates of the present, comprising over 1,000 prints and a film. The project is named after the beginning of a sentence in William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (published in six installments between 1844 and 1946), the first photographically illustrated book. An exhibition was curated by Sonel Breslav at Baxter St/Camera Club of New York, New York in 2015 with a book published by Blonde Art Books and Secretary Press. A second exhibition was curated by Jo-ey Tang and Thomas Fougeirol at Galerie Praz Delavallade, Paris in 2017. At the end of 2018, the entire archive entered the permanent collection of Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris.