Ken Domon

Ken Domon's postwar call for "realist photography" grew out of two dissatisfactions: the salon photography of the prewar years, with its emphasis on technical prettiness, and his own experience participating in wartime propaganda imagery. His principles were the direct connection between camera and motif and the absolutely un-staged snapshot. For Domon, photography's task was to present social reality and human life without embellishment or theatrical manipulation^*1. From 1950 onward he served as a monthly juror for the magazine Camera, where he influenced large numbers of amateur photographers; among those shaped by his ideas were later major figures such as Kikuji Kawada, Shomei Tomatsu, and Masahisa Fukase^*2. In 1955 he declared the end of realism's "first stage" and moved toward a deeper second stage with his work on the victims of Hiroshima. Over the course of a year beginning in 1957, he worked obsessively in atomic-bomb hospitals, facilities for the disabled, and orphanages, producing 5,800 negatives from which 171 photographs were selected for the 1958 book Hiroshima. The book had a major impact both inside and outside Japan and is widely regarded as one of the summits of postwar Japanese documentary photography^*3. His book Children of Chikuho (1960), on the poverty of children in the coal-mining region, sold some 100,000 copies in an inexpensive edition and won the Japan Journalists Conference Award. His long project Pilgrimage Through Ancient Temples, produced between 1963 and 1975, used a large-format camera and multi-flash lighting to photograph Buddhist sculpture in Nara, Horyuji, Yakushiji, and elsewhere. It became the work through which he asked, photographically, what Japanese culture and the Japanese people might be. Even after a stroke in 1968, he continued working from a wheelchair until the project was complete^*4. The photographers formed under the banner of realism helped define the golden age of Japanese photography in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Ken Domon Museum of Photography, opened in Sakata in 1983, now preserves the full range of his work^*5.