The Camera on Two Legs
Suda Issei: Landscapes of Japan, Margins of the City

About the exhibition

The FUJIFILM SQUARE Photo History Museum is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Suda Issei, one of the leading photographers in Japan in the postwar period.

Suda Issei (1940–2019) is internationally acclaimed for snapshots that capture an offbeat world concealed inside everyday life. His photographic expression has a strong impact on the viewer with its matter-of-fact yet mysterious exploration of things in a body of work that includes the early masterpiece Fushi Kaden. Even after he passed away in 2019, a series of posthumous photo exhibitions and publications have opened up opportunities to reevaluate his work at home and abroad.

This exhibition presents about thirty newly printed color photographs carefully selected from Suda's 1986 exhibition, Landscape of Japan, Margins of the City, at the Fuji Photo Salon Professional Space (Ginza, Tokyo), the predecessor of FUJIFILM SQUARE. An unsung masterpiece, the exhibition features mysterious scenes across Japan from his own Kanda neighborhood in Tokyo to Ueno and Asakusa, as well as Karuizawa and Hakone. The images were captured between 1982 and 1986 using a 6x6 medium format camera loaded with color-positive film. At the time, Suda wrote the following statement to accompany the exhibition.

Sometimes I would leave Tokyo where the function of the landscape had become ossified and I would travel where the road took me. Unfamiliar areas, beautiful scenery, impressive historical buildings. However, it was always the mundane scenes I came across that made me stop. The transitory and idiosyncratic spaces in my surroundings suddenly stood out. On my journeys, the everyday seemed distorted with a kind of intensity that scratched at my eyes with a raw sharpness and tried to obstruct my gaze on the existing landscape.
Assuming that beautiful views of famous places and sightseeing areas are “the light,” then my archetypal images are perhaps “the shadows” of everyday life thrown onto the same surfaces.

What Suda saw through his lens in each of these places is not the usual beautiful landscape, but unremarkable sights and moments that have, in a manner of speaking, been pushed to the margins. However, the images that he picked out are filled with a sense of tension that appears to expose the reverse side of familiar things, the true nature concealed deep within. At the same time, the images reveal the essence of photography as an expression of personal visual experience.

Thinking about photography around the clock, Suda kept taking pictures as he walked the streets, never letting go of his camera even for an instant, shamelessly and reflexively pressing the shutter. He did not look like a professional photographer, but like someone possessed by photography, someone whose whole body had become a camera. He had become “a camera on two legs.”

We hope you will enjoy the parallel universe in everyday life made visible through the lens of Suda Issei, the camera on two legs.