Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961-1989

Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961-1989 explores the radical reconsideration of the photographic medium in post-World War II Japan through outstanding works from the Center for Creative Photography.

In the decades following World War II, as Japan recovered from the devastation wrought by the global conflict, numerous Japanese photographers undertook an aggressive reassessment of the photographic medium. Emerging from the lingering shadow of U.S. military occupation (1945-1952), these new non-conformists broke from photojournalism’s norms of objective description and instead adopted a radically expressive, subjective, and critical approach: are-bure-boke (literally translated to “rough, blurred, and out-of-focus”). The aesthetic responded to the realities of a rapidly changing, modernizing, and Westernizing Japan and questioned traditional associations of photography with truth, patriotism, and complacency.

In 1988 and 1990, through grants from the Hitachi Corporation, the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) acquired 87 works by 19 contemporary Japanese photographers who promoted are-bure-boke and played integral roles in shaping Japanese photography of the postwar period. Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961-1989 displays all 87 of these prints from CCP’s collection together for the first time since they were acquired.

Featured works include gritty, starkly contrasted, black-and-white photographs from Daidō Moriyama’s seminal 1972 photobook, Farewell Photography, which announced photography’s departure from the medium’s previous commitments to propriety, stillness, and objective fact-rendering. Additional artists showcased throughout the exhibition include Masahisa Fukase, Shōmei Tōmatsu, Miyako Ishiuchi, Eikoh Hosoe, and others.

Credit: Overview from museum website