Eyes of an Island - Japanese Photograhy 1945-2007

'Shashin' is the word for photography in Japanese. It translates literally as ‘truth copy’. It is a fitting description for the mood of this show, which surveys Japanese photography from the end of the Pacific War in 1945 to the present day. Following the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japanese surrender, the country faced reconstruction and the search for a new identity. In a society that had been saturated with wartime propaganda, people hungered for authenticity. This striving energizes the work of photographers who worked in the forties and fifties and who are featured in this show like Shigeichi Nagano and Takeyoshi Tanuma. Also included are many other well-known Japanese photographers: Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Hiroshi Hamaya, Hiromi Tsuchida and Eikoh Hosoe. There is more recent work from Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ryuji Miyamoto and others. It is an exhibition that you can really get your teeth into.

Many of the pictures have strong graphic elements, thanks to the fact that they were featured in newspapers or magazines. Until relatively recently, most photographers working in Japan showed their work mainly in print publications, rather than galleries. The first exclusively photographic gallery in Japan opened in 1973.

Some of my favourites: Nagano's 'Women Collecting Sand' (1957) focuses on the geometric quality of the women's hats. Hamaya's 'Woman Planting Rice' (1955) crops the figure's head and arm from the frame, so that the image is reduced to the sinuous dark shape of the woman against the light-filled background of the watery rice fields. Hamaya's 'Bathing in a Hot Spring' (1957) utilizes the angular outline of the tub for visual tension. For photographers like Hamaya, even photos of people in a hot tub are dynamically composed.