Organised as part of the celebrations of the bicentenary of the birth of photography, this exhibition traces, through 300 works – including 250 photographic prints, mostly in black and white, and some fifty rare books from the collections of the BnF – the evolution of photographic practice in Japan over 80 years.
From the late 1960s onwards, the Bibliothèque nationale de France established itself as one of the first Western institutions to take an interest in modern and contemporary Japanese photography. Already rich in a remarkable collection of Japanese prints from the 17th to the 19th centuries, it gradually built up an exceptional photographic collection.