This page gathers photographers connected to Japan and traces how each links to a period and movement in the history of photography.
Yokoyama Matsusaburō worked across photography, photo-oil painting, lithography, and cultural heritage documentation, playing a central role in the visual record-keeping of the …
Tomishige Rihei founded the Tomishige Photography Studio in Kumamoto, leaving portrait photographs of figures including Natsume Soseki and Lafcadio Hearn and documentation of …
The second-generation head of the Tomishige Photography Studio, Tokuji continued the institutional practice and documentary record-keeping established by Rihei. He is …
Kajima Seibei was a Meiji-era photography patron known as the "photographic magnate." Operating the Genroku-kan studio in Ginza, founding a domestic dry plate manufacturing …
Koreaki Kamei was a Meiji-era court noble and count who organized a photographic team to document the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). He compiled more than 300 war …
Kohei Yasu was a Japanese photographer born in the late Edo period who opened a "Fotografía Japonesa" studio in Guatemala. Converting to Catholicism under the name Juan José de …
Ryuzo Torii was a self-educated Japanese anthropologist and archaeologist who conducted fieldwork in Taiwan, Manchuria, Korea, Okinawa, the Ainu region, Mongolia, and elsewhere …
First president of Shiseido who, while shaping corporate culture, established the photographic institution of Japan through founding the Sha-shin Geijutsu-sha and Shiseido …
Photographer who united the material quality of pictorialist printing with modern portrait expression, opening new possibilities for portraiture in Japanese modern photography …
Photographer who connected experiences in New York and Paris to Kobe and Ashiya's photographic culture, contributing to the formation of Japanese modernist photography. He …
Photographer who worked within Kansai photographic culture — the Naniwa and Tampei photography clubs — developing wide-ranging experiments from pictorialism to constructive …
Ken Domon moved from prewar press photography to a postwar career defined by serial projects on children, Buddhist temples, Hiroshima, and coal-mining communities. His doctrine …
Shoji Ueda staged everyday scenes on the sand dunes of Tottori, presenting family members and acquaintances as figures within carefully arranged compositions. His style, known …
Shigene Kanamaru shaped the institutional foundations of Japanese modernist photography through commercial practice, education, and criticism rather than primarily through …
Photographer, editor, and photographic historian, Hachiro Suzuki was an infrastructural figure who supported Japanese photographic culture in the 1930s–40s through technical …
A photographer who produced travel and expedition photobooks across Manchuria, the Himalayas, and India, positioning himself at the intersection of colonial visual culture and …
Koyo Kageyama worked as a press photographer through the wartime period and continued to document family life, children, and urban change in postwar Japan. His photographs — …
Ihei Kimura connected the speed of the small camera to literary-figure portraits, the street corners of Tokyo, and everyday life in Akita, helping to shape postwar Japanese …
Eiko Yamazawa was a Japanese abstract photographer best known for What I Am Doing. She learned photography in Consuelo Kanaga’s studio in the 1920s and, after decades of …
He turned his honeymoon into a self-published book and established the term "I-photography" (shishashin). He invented the editorial gesture of connecting the boundaries between …
Shomei Tomatsu photographed postwar Japan as a continuing presence in matter and bodies, from melted glass and scarred skin in Nagasaki to English signs around American bases …
Takeyoshi Tanuma recorded postwar Japanese civic life and the transformation of Tokyo across more than sixty years, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the war. His civic …
Born in 1921 and deceased in 2022, Hideo Haga spent decades recording festivals, folklore, and vernacular custom across Japan at a moment when rapid modernization threatened to …
Born in Yamagata in 1933, Eikoh Hosoe developed theatrical and symbolic black-and-white series through collaboration with dancers and writers in postwar Japanese avant-garde …
Born in 1940 and deceased in 2024, Kishin Shinoyama became known for a vast practice ranging from celebrity portraiture and nude photography to architecture, magazines, and …
Takeji Iwamiya developed a photographic practice on the border between document and formal inquiry, focusing on Japanese temples, gardens, craft objects, Buddhist sculpture, and …
Born in 1933 and died in 2021, Kikuji Kawada is known as a member of VIVO and as the maker of The Map (1959–1965), one of the defining photobooks of postwar Japanese …
Born in 1934 and deceased in 2012, Masahisa Fukase is known for intensely personal photography centered on family, his wife Yoko, solitude, and psychic collapse. His major works …
Toyoko Tokiwa photographed the lives of “working women” in post-occupation Yokohama: the akasen red-light district, clinics, women’s professional wrestling, nude shooting …
A photographer who captured Tokyo and streets across Japan — theaters, entertainment districts, advertisements, magazine and television images — using grainy, blurred …
Japanese photographer and critic, born in 1938 and died in 2015. Historical significance: he is significant because he changed how photography could be theorized and practiced …
Sugimoto has photographed natural-history museum dioramas, cinema projection light, ocean horizons, wax-figure portraits, mathematical models, and optical experiments — always …
Japanese photographer, born in 1940 and died in 2019. Historical significance: he is significant because he gave postwar Japanese photography one of its most singular visual …
Japanese photographer, born in 1946. Historical significance: he is significant because he became one of the best-known Japanese photographers working internationally in …
Japanese photographer, born in 1950. Historical significance: he is significant because he made wildlife photography one of the most publicly visible branches of late …
Japanese photographer, born in 1947 in Gunma and raised in Yokosuka. Historical significance: she is significant because she broadened postwar Japanese photography beyond …
Japanese documentary photographer, born in 1948. Historical significance: she is significant because she made the postwar lives of survivors into a central photographic subject …
Japanese photographer, born in 1939. Historical significance: he is significant because he made Hiroshima one of the central long-form subjects of late twentieth-century …
Tokuko Ushioda is a photographer who has used refrigerators, books, and the light and household objects left in the rooms of Gotokuji to photograph the time of those close to …
Japanese photographer, born in 1954. Historical significance: he is significant because he carried the intensity of 1970s Japanese street photography into later documentary and …
Yasumasa Morimura inserts his own body into masterpieces, film stars, and historical photographs. In doing so, he turns photography from an act of resemblance into a site where …
Japanese photographer born in 1972 in Shiga and based in Tokyo. Known for photographs of domestic objects and landscapes that use scale, arrangement, and framing to complicate …
Japanese photographer born in 1962 in Tokyo. Known for work on suburbs, contemporary urban life, family and domesticity, and later experiments with camera obscura and …
Japanese photographer born in 1965. Known for elaborately staged photographic series in which models and actresses invent fictional circumstances of their own deaths, presented …
Japanese photographer born in 1957, originally trained in sculpture and later active as a photographer and educator.*1*2*3 Known for photographs that register traces of light …
Japanese photographer, writer on photography, and editor born in 1936. Also important as a historian, organizer, and editor of books on museum and photography collections, in …
Michio Hoshino was born in 1952 in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, and photographed Alaska's wildlife, landscapes, human lives, and myths through both images and prose. His …
Japanese photographer born in 1958 in Rikuzentakata, Iwate. Known for long-term work on quarries, urban infrastructure, architecture, and landscapes in transition, later …
Yuki Onodera changes the apparatus of exposure and the processes of the darkroom from one series to the next: second-hand clothes suspended against the sky, a glass marble …
Yurie Nagashima has moved between self-portraiture, family photography, photobooks, and writing, repeatedly asking who photographs women’s bodies and who determines what those …
Sakiko Nomura is a photographer who has brought together male nudes, night, flowers, rooms, the sea, and scenes of travel through dense blacks and the sequence of the photobook …
Rinko Kawauchi is a key figure in contemporary Japanese photography whose pale 6×6 color photographs and edited photobooks bring everyday details, light, and cycles of life and …
Mika Ninagawa photographs flowers, goldfish, and people in intense color, and has extended her work across photobooks, magazines, advertising, film, and exhibitions. Her …
Taiji Matsue (born 1963 in Tokyo) is a Japanese photographer who photographs the earth’s surface while excluding the horizon and sky and using frontal light to suppress shadow …
Lieko Shiga has examined how a constructed scene, once it becomes a photograph, returns carrying traces of reality that slip away from the photographer’s intention. In CANARY …
Noriko Hayashi (born 1983) is a documentary photographer who works on underreported social issues, including bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan and Yazidi prayer. Winner of the 2013 …
Arata Dodo is a photographer who travels through Shanghai, the Caspian coast, the Silk Road, and Kyoto, and who, rather than closing travel off as exoticism, edits the lived …
Asako Narahashi has long worked with a handheld camera, walking through cities and places she visits, making many exposures, and selecting photographs later. In her early work …
Yuki Tawada’s work begins with photography’s double status: it circulates as an objective record while acting forcefully on memory and the unconscious. She scrapes, burns, and …
Daisuke Yokota (born 1983 in Saitama) is a Japanese photographer who repeatedly develops, scans, rephotographs, burns, folds, and damages film and prints, making the materiality …
Kenta Cobayashi works with photography through #smudge, Tokyo Débris, and #copycat as a mutable image formed among image-editing software, pixels, bodily gestures, AI …
Mayumi Hosokura works with nudes, portraits, plants, minerals, neon, selfies, and sculpture through color, photobooks, digital collage, and exhibition space. Through NEW SKIN …
Masashi Asada is a photographer who treats photography as the act of taking, looking at, keeping, and returning — from Asadake, in which the family performs roles together to …
Nerhol is an artist duo formed by Yoshihisa Tanaka and Ryuta Iida. Their work moves away from the assumption that a photograph is a single flat image and reworks photography as …
Mari Katayama creates prosthetic legs and hand-sewn doubles, then carefully stages them with her own body for the camera. This essay traces how she brings prostheses, clothing …
Aya Fujioka photographs gestures and disquieting details of everyday life on her travels, in her hometown of Kure, in New York, and in Hiroshima. Through delayed selection and …