The exhibition in brief
From the late 1960s onward, 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 woodblock prints from the 17th to the 19th centuries, it gradually built an exceptional photographic collection.
Held in the Département des Estampes et de la photographie, this holding brings together nearly 4,000 prints made by some 200 artists and photojournalists, as well as around a hundred journals and emblematic books tracing the history of Japanese photography since 1945. This collection, among the most important in the Western world, was assembled with the help of Japanese photographers based in France in the second half of the 20th century, who became ambassadors of the extraordinary creative ferment of their archipelago.
This major exhibition brings together around a hundred artists: authors now widely recognized on the international scene, but also other figures whose approaches and styles deserve to be discovered.
The originality of the BnF's Japanese photography collection also lies in the major thematic and aesthetic currents that run through it. Sometimes rooted in the real, through reportage devoted to rural life, festivals, rituals, or urban and economic expansion, sometimes theatrical, whimsical, or poetic, Japanese photography gives an essential place to sensations and atmospheres. It unfolds in works combining a remarkable simplicity of composition with great sophistication of printing.
Facing Reality
Reportage photography and its realism occupy a dominant place in postwar production, as attested by the reportage of Hiroshi Hamaya, the series of Hiromi Tsuchida, or those of Yoko Yamamoto, helping to rebuild a shared national foundation in which resilience after the nuclear trauma, interest in ancestral customs, and aspiration to modernity intermingle.
Strange Everyday Life
More intimate works, notably by authors of the Konpora Shashin movement such as Shigeo Gocho or Tokuko Ushioda, produce, in the 1960s to 1980s, snapshots of ordinary experience. Through composition, framing, or unexpected encounters, banality then takes on a tinge of strangeness.
staged Bodies
The theatrical staged works by Shoji Ueda, Eikō Hosoe and his students, or Yuki Onodera and Mami Kiyoshi, reveal the influence of the highly visual world of traditional Japanese performing arts. This section brings together a large number of photographic research and experiments centered on the direction of bodies.
Hello Paris!
Many Japanese photographers in the BnF collection have turned their gaze toward Paris, such as Ihei Kimura, Yoshi Takata, Keiichi Tahara, Mamoru Sakamoto, or Jun Shiraoka, who came to work or even live in the French capital. These viewpoints, which oscillate between curiosity and fantasy, the search for archetypes and familiar references, a concern for capturing the particular, and a rejection of all exoticism, reflect the fruitful back-and-forth between the two cultures.
Calligraphies of the World
The human figure gives way to the reign of forms, influenced by the Eastern art of calligraphy and a minimalism combining, as in the work of Shōmei Tōmatsu, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Takehiko Nakafuji, and even Sayuri Ichida, the quest for austerity and the excellence of contrast effects.
Sensitive and Impalpable
This section unfolds a world of sensations and atmospheres, from the shadowy landscapes of Hiroto Fujimoto and Kazuo Amemiya to portraits of elements captured by Koichiro Kurita and Sayuki Inoue (wind and waters). The pursuit of sensitive abstraction, through an artistic approach to nature often steeped in Zen Buddhism, is expressed here in the materiality of prints and books, between velvety nuances and an ode to shadow.