Hiroji Kubota “Photographer”
Sundaram Tagore Gallery
This event has ended.
More than one hundred photographs by Hiroji Kubota will be on view in a two-part exhibition: color dye-transfer prints produced from 1978 to 2003 are on view at Sundaram Tagore Chelsea and black-and-white platinum prints from 1963 to 1989 are on view in Aperture Gallery.
Rooted in his experience of Japan, ravaged by destruction and famine at the end of World War II, Hiroji Kubota’s work is characterized by a desire to find beauty and honor in human experience. He was born in Tokyo in 1939 and began his career assisting Magnum photographers René Burri, Burt Glinn and Elliott Erwitt on their visit to Japan in 1961. Becoming a Magnum photographer himself, he produced major bodies of work on the United States, Japan, China, North and South Korea and Southeast Asia.
Hiroji Kubota was introduced to the dye-transfer printing process at the urging of a friend in the late 1980s. This costly and complicated process used to create high-quality multi-color materials for print advertising was mostly phased out by the 1960s, except for a few printers who continued to use it for photographic art. One of those printers, Nino Mondhe—who printed for Irving Penn and Harry Callahan—was known for using twelve colors instead of the traditional three. Kubota, dazzled by the spectrum of vibrant color Mondhe achieved, produced fifty-five prints and two triptychs with the master printer over a twenty-year period, until the materials ran out and Mondhe eventually closed his studio. This exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to view Kubota’s collection of color images produced with a rarely used technique that is impossible to duplicate today.
Media
Schedule
from November 18, 2015 to January 02, 2016
Opening Reception on 2015-11-18 from 18:00 to 20:30
The artist will be present at the opening.