New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1974. Paperback, 120 pages, with over 85 black and white plates. 1st edition. Text in English and Japanese. Clean, tight, intact, no writing. A fine copy of a rare book.
NEW JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY was the first attempt to present an extensive survey of contemporary Japanese photography outside Japan. The exhibition ran at The Museum of Modern Art from March 27 through May 19, 1974. Co-directed by John Szarkowski, Director of the Museum's Department of Photography, and Shoji Yamagishi, Japanese critic and editor of Camera Mainichi, the exhibition consisted of 187 photographs, dating from 1940 to 1973, presented as a series of one-man shows which identified the central concerns of 15 photographers.
In the book that accompanied the exhibition, John Szarkowski attributed the rise of a distinctively Japanese photography, radically different since the 1950s, to the bankruptcy of the prewar tradition of photographic pictorialism in that Japan, the national fascination with photographic technique, and the stunning speed with which the character of Japanese life has been transformed since the end of World War II. "The quality most central to recent Japanese photography is its concern for the description of immediate experience; most of these pictures impress us not as a comment on experience, or as a reconstruction of it into something more stable and lasting, but as an apparent surrogate for experience itself, put down with a surely intentional lack of reflection." (From the March 27, 1974 Moma press release)
Photographers:
Ken Domon, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Masatoshi Naitoh, Tetsuya Ichimura, Hiromi Tsuchida, Masahisa Fukase, Ikko, Eikoh Hosoe, Daidoh Moriyama, Ryoji Akiyama, Ken Ohara, Shigeru Tamura, Bishin Jumonji