Reframing 'Hokkaido Photography': Style, Politics, and Documentary Photography in 1960s Japan

This article investigates the political ramifications of the Japanese postwar revisiting of the nineteenth-century photographs of Hokkaido, a northern island colonised by the Japanese empire in 1869. Compared with the programme of American Western Settlement, the Hokkaido Colonisation Project active...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inHistory of photography Vol. 39; no. 4; pp. 348 - 365
Main Author Kim, Gyewon
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 02.10.2015
Subjects
archive
are bure boke
documentary photography
Hokkaido
Moriyama Daidō (1938-)
Naitō Masatoshi (1938-)
Nakahira Takuma (1938-2015)
Provoke
style
Taki Kōji (1928-2011)
Tamoto Kenzō (1832-1907)
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Summary:This article investigates the political ramifications of the Japanese postwar revisiting of the nineteenth-century photographs of Hokkaido, a northern island colonised by the Japanese empire in 1869. Compared with the programme of American Western Settlement, the Hokkaido Colonisation Project actively adopted photography as an efficient means of documentation and communication. The historical photographs of Hokkaido were reinterpreted by postwar avant-garde artists, who hailed them as the origin of documentary photography in Japan. This return to the archival records was the ironic result of an artistic response to the social milieu of the 1960s, when state ideology and Cold War politics were heavily imposed on Japan.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0308-7298
2150-7295
DOI:10.1080/03087298.2015.1112532