Japanese Photography Magazines, 1880s to 1980s

Japanese Photography Magazines, 1880s to 1980s by Kaneko Ryūichi, Toda Masako, Ivan Vartanian

Japanese Photography Magazines: 1880s to 1980s is a one-hundred-year history told through camera and photography magazines. With over 1,300 illustrations, this book shows how magazines continually served as a genre-defining platform. Starting with the earliest camera-related publications in the 19th century through to the end of the magazine's golden era in the 1980s, this book immerses the reader into the work of well-established as well as overlooked photographers, representing a broad range of imagery and approaches.

The book also features an ample amount of primary writings by photographers that were originally included in the magazine pages, providing essential background and context to some of the most iconic images in the field. Such writings include texts by Araki Nobuyoshi, Fukase Masahisa, Hosoe Eikoh, Kawada Kikuji, Kimura Ihei, Moriyama Daido, Narahara Ikko, Sako Kōichi, Yasui Nakaji, as well as writings by Tanikawa Shuntarō, Terayama Shūji, among many others.

Each of the featured magazine stories are accompanied with authoritative historical information, which, as a whole, provides the reader with a balanced and nuanced survey of this history of Japanese photography. This gives the reader a grounding into the core concepts and vocabulary for understanding the definitive characteristic of photography from Japan. Almost all of the stories that are featured in this volume are reproduced in their entirety, making this volume an invaluable resource for researchers, collectors, general readers, and photography fans.