Whilst staying in Tokyo I started doing some research about postwar Japanese photography and what has been called the lost decades after the collapse of the 1980s bubble economy. Since photography doesn’t happen in a vacuum I was trying to gain a sense of the world I’d stepped into as a tourist and a photographer. Very little is known about the history of postwar Japanese photography in Australia. I was there prior to the release of OpenAI’s video generator Sora that can create realistic footage up to a minute long that adheres to a user’s instructions on both subject matter and style. It is latest in the AI technologies that summarize and processes human generated information (AIs such as Midjourney and Dall-E are already replacing Shutterstock-type photography).
It was obvious that historically speaking photography in Japan was more or less photography in Tokyo. Historically, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (it became the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum after 2016) played a central role in establishing photography, not only as a genre of modern and contemporary art in Japan, but also as a subject of academic study. Its initial canon of photography constructed after its establishment in the 1990s was centred around the postwar photography of the two generations of Japanese-occupation, male photographers.
It was Kaneko Ryūichi, a curator and photo historian at the Photographic Art Museum, who recognized that the photobooks made in the 1960s and ‘70s represented the golden age of Japanese photobooks. These photobooks suggest that Japanese postwar photography was less a by-product of Western culture and more a direct response to the political and social constraints that dominated postwar Japan in the shadow of the atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American occupation and Japan’s emergence from the ashes of war into a prosperous nation with a booming consumer economy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Whilst in Japan various conversations with people indicated that the Japan I was walking in as a tourist was the post-bubble Japan with its significant overhang of the lost decade of the 1990s on the present. The 1990s was a period of transformation and change towards a more market oriented economy with its embrace of the logic of neo-liberalism, the emergence of the precariat, greater inequality, increasing poverty of the working poor, the applications of market principles to to society, and the loss of traditional forms of social connectedness.
The overhang was 3 decades of post bubble period of the 1990s-2000s was a period of economic stagnation with its sense of hopelessness and loss of confidence in the future. The impact this had for photography was that there was a turn away from international art exhibitions to an emphasis on DIY practices, smaller scale, local communities. It was like a turn back to the postwar past.
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