From the 1945 bombing of Japan to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, photography blossomed in this rapidly evolving country. Thanks to photography, in which even Japanese can feel free to talk about shame and guilt, we could find more paths to understand this country. Nude female characters in Nobuyoshi Araki’s work, the sex-saturated underworld of Shinjuku that shown by Shōmei Tōmatsu, and the intensive connection between death and sex obsession in Eikō Hosoe’s photography. The generation of postwar Japanese photographers attracts wide attention from all over the world, they doubtless did a great jot to transform shame into art.
Postwar photography in Japan has been experiencing several stages. Right after the war the most urgent mission for photography was baring witness, when people all longed for objective journalism. By the early 1950s Japan started its economic growth. Tensions between tradition and modern has been exacerbated, at the same time post-war photo-realist movement reached limits, young photographers started showing their person interpretation of ongoing changes happened in Japan. When it came to the 1960s, “the tensions linked to the American occupation and to the disruptive effects of Japan’s rapid economic growth had begun to boil over”, photography of that era became even more personal and subjective. By 1980, Japan had cemented its status as a global economic superpower, photographers such as Naoya Hatakeyama began to use photography “as a means of stepping away from the collusion of participatory experience”, led to “images with a distinct visual quietude and often a measured distance from their subject.” (Feustel)
Postwar photography in Japan has been experiencing several stages. Right after the war the most urgent mission for photography was baring witness, when people all longed for objective journalism. By the early 1950s Japan started its economic growth. Tensions between tradition and modern has been exacerbated, at the same time post-war photo-realist movement reached limits, young photographers started showing their person interpretation of ongoing changes happened in Japan. When it came to the 1960s, “the tensions linked to the American occupation and to the disruptive effects of Japan’s rapid economic growth had begun to boil over”, photography of that era became even more personal and subjective. By 1980, Japan had cemented its status as a global economic superpower, photographers such as Naoya Hatakeyama began to use photography “as a means of stepping away from the collusion of participatory experience”, led to “images with a distinct visual quietude and often a measured distance from their subject.” (Feustel)