About the exhibition
Kazuo Kitai (1944—) is a leading photographer in postwar Japan. Highly
acclaimed in Japan and abroad and still attracting international attention
today, his works, which are focused on motifs from daily life, capture the age
with precision.
Kazuo Kitai's photographs for To the Village were serialized in
twenty-four issues of the Asahi Camera monthly magazine from January 1974 to
December 1975. The 1970s was a time when people in Japan were rapidly turning
their attention to the cities. As if opposing this trend, Kitai chose the
village as his subject, causing a stir with a fresh perspective that portrayed
perfectly ordinary everyday life in After the Rice Harvest, Hot Springs, In the
Snow, Country Road, Bon Festival, and other photographs. Kitai was presented
with the inaugural Kimura Ihei Award for this acclaimed series of photographs. A
sequel was serialized in Asahi Camera from January 1976 to June 1977. In October
1976, the To the Village collection of photographs was published in a special
issue of Asahi Camera, and in 1980, the re-edited series was published by
Tankosha as a photo book. Subsequently adapted and re-published in photo books
or presented at photo exhibitions, To the Village is a rare work that has
enjoyed uninterrupted attention up to the present day.
In 1964, Kitai launched his career as a photographer with the
self-published Resistance (Mirai-sha Publishers, 1965), a collection of
photographs he had taken at the demonstrations to block nuclear submarines from
making ports of call at the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka. Later, he also
photographed the upheaval of the radical student movement for The Asahi Picture
News. But eventually, Kitai's interests shifted from conflict to the activities
of people in their daily lives. In 1969, Kitai adopted the same standpoint as
his subjects for Sanrizuka (Nora-sha, 1971), a photo book where he documented
the farmers in the village of Sanrizuka who were opposed to the construction of
Narita Airport. Acclaimed for its expression and for its perspective on everyday
themes, the work won Kitai The Photographic Society of Japan Newcomer's Award.
Developing empathy with the people who became his subjects and photographing
their daily lives, Kitai discovered his own unique themes and approaches to
photography while working on this project. The warm gaze of the photographer is
consistently present in his subsequent works. In To the Village, he
painstakingly and quietly captures mundane scenes in farming villages that are
on the verge of falling into ruin.
For this exhibition, we have carefully selected approximately thirty
valuable vintage prints* from the timeless masterpiece To the Village, a work
for which the photographer was awarded the inaugural Kimura Ihei Award. When
Kitai took the photographs, the subject of the village was diametrically opposed
to the trends of the day, but as the years have passed, the photographs have
come to symbolize that era. The casual everyday scenes make us feel even more
deeply the importance of keeping records. Today, when our society is permeated
with digital photography and social media, the way we take and look at pictures,
and the methods of expression have undergone great change. Perhaps this is why
these vintage prints from nearly half a century ago speak even more strongly of
the starting point of photographs, which is to record, and the essence of
photography, which is to express the viewpoint of the photographer.
We hope you will enjoy
these masterpieces by the photographer Kazuo Kitai, who recorded his encounters
with people and their times.
- *A
vintage print is made by the photographer within a few years of exposing the
negative. It is a valuable and esthetically important print of considerable
age. Vintage prints are also important for best reflecting the
photographer's ideas when the photos were taken.
