I. Showa Portraits: Tracing the People and History of the Showa Era through Photography
II. The Visual Revolution of the Machine Age: Photography and Film between the World Wars
In conjunction with ”The photographic works of Kishin Shinoyama ’Picture power’”, we present a special large-scale exhibit of photographs.
As the center of photographic technology, which was first introduced from the West in the late 19th century, Yokohama played an extremely important role in the birth of photography in Japan. And being that it was established in the same city, the Yokohama Museum of Art places a strong emphasis on collecting photographic works among a diverse range of artistic genres. Today, photographs account for more than 4,200 of the approximately 12,000 works in the museum collection. And the fact that when the facility opened in 1989 it was the first public museum to create a permanent gallery devoted solely to photography exemplifies the museum’s policy. This exhibition is notable as our first attempt to present a large number of photographic works from the collection at the same time in all of the museum’s galleries.
The exhibition consists of two sections. The first, “Showa Portraits: Tracing the People and History of the Showa Era through Photography,” looks back at photographs from the Showa Period (1926-1989), which lasted for over 60 years. We return to this tumultuous time, which formed the foundation for Japan’s current social structure and living environment by examining a group of portraits depicting figures from many different fields who made their mark on the era, and pictures of landscapes and customs that are reflective the period.
The second section, “The Visual Revolution of the Machine Age: Photography and Film between the World Wars,” focuses on Western photographic expressions from the first half of the 20th century. During this era, many types of photographic art, marked by an acute vision, which can only be likened to a “Machine Eye,” emerged simultaneously throughout the world. In this exhibit, we look at film, a visual medium that had just been born at the time, as well as works from other genres with common points.
By introducing more than 400 works from the museum’s photography collection all at once, we hope to provide viewers with an opportunity to savor the multifaceted charms of a medium that has evolved while constantly wavering between documentary and art.
