The Japanese Photobook 1912-1980

From pictorialism to Provoke: the most extensive history of Japanese photobooks ever published

The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990 illustrates the development of photography as seen in photo publications in Japan--from the early influence of European and American pictorialism, the German Bauhaus and imperial military propaganda to the complete collapse and destruction of the country in 1945. Then followed a new beginning: with the unique self-determination of a young generation of photographers and visual artists highlighted by the Provoke style--an experimental Japanese photography magazine that had a profound effect on the medium in the 1970s and ‘80s--as well as protest and war documentation of the late 1950s to the early ‘70s, the signature Japanese photobook, as we have come to know it, was born.

Edited by Manfred Heiting, who has also designed and edited extensive surveys of German and Soviet photobooks, the volume is over 500 pages and features such photographers as Yoshio Watanabe, Akira Hoshi, Hayao Yoshikawa, Shinichi Kato, Yasuo Wakuda, Tetsuo Kitahara, Moriyama Daido, Koji Taki, Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Kimura Ihei, Hamaya, Katura, Kazano, Kikuti, Mituzumi, Watanabe, Yamahata, Sozo Okada and Kazano Karuo, among many others.

With detailed information and illustrations of over 400 photo publications, an essay by Ryuichi Kaneko, the leading historian of Japanese photobooks, and contributions from Duncan Forbes, Matthew S. Witkovsky and others, this is the most extensive English-language survey of Japanese photobooks of this period and a crucial step in making the history of Japanese photography--long neglected by the Western canon--accessible to the English-speaking world.