“Longing for Identity: Postwar Japanese Photographers” Exhibition
Yoshii Gallery
This event has ended.
Yoshii Gallery presents “Longing for Identity: Postwar Japanese Photographers.” This exhibition brings together important and rarely seen vintage photographic works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe, Kazuo Kitai, Seiji Kurata, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu and Shoji Ueda from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. It unveils how Japanese photographers responded to their country’s shifting social and political surrounding during the postwar years.
By presenting an insider’s view of the condition of Japan after the devastation of the war and the legacy of the atomic bomb, while at the same time accentuating the effects that industrialization, urbanization, and the American occupation had on this transformed metropolitan society, the photographers featured in this show were at the cutting edge of a postwar cultural movement in Japan. Particularly interested in exploring subjects such as death, erotic obsession and irrationality to increase the psychological impact of the images, the seven artists share a common sensibility while their works differ in style. Meanwhile, they suggest the imprints of popular culture in the modernization of the new society by depicting the various moments in urban life.
In the midst of momentous change, a spirit of disillusionment with traditional culture and old values permeated the contemporary Japanese young generation, and these “New Wave” Japanese photographers were recording and inventing political, social, and esthetic norms with influences from western idea of Surrealism and Dadaism. Their radical approach, including the borrowing of surrealist and expressionist styles, the use of odd camera angles and cropping, marks the new era of photography in Japan.
The photographs provoke the viewers to re-think the country’s past and future, and reflect the new generation’s radical break from the shackles of the national traditions as well as their longing for a new identity for the modern Japan.
[Image: Nobuyoshi Araki "Theater of Love" Vintage B & W print, 6 x 5 in.]
Media
Schedule
from March 03, 2011 to April 09, 2011