Longing For Identity: Postwar Japanese Photographers

Seiji Kurata... Flash Up (1975, Vintage B & W print). From the exhibition Longing For Identity: Postwar Japanese Photographers at Yoshii Gallery in New York. "...This exhibition brings together important and rarely seen vintage photographic works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe, Kazuo Kitai, Seiji Kurata, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu and Shoji Ueda from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. It unveils how Japanese photographers responded to their country’s shifting social and political surrounding during the postwar years.
By presenting an insider’s view of the condition of Japan after the devastation of the war and the legacy of the atomic bomb, while at the same time accentuating the effects that industrialization, urbanization, and the American occupation had on this transformed metropolitan society, the photographers featured in this show were at the cutting edge of a postwar cultural movement in Japan. Particularly interested in exploring subjects such as death, erotic obsession and irrationality to increase the psychological impact of the images, the seven artists share a common sensibility while their works differ in style. Meanwhile, they suggest the imprints of popular culture in the modernization of the new society by depicting the various moments in urban life."