KITAJIMA KEIZO 1975-1991

Koza/Tokyo/New York/Eastern Europe/U.S.S.R.

Aug. 29—Oct. 18, 2009

• Aug. 29—Oct. 18, 2009
• Closed Monday (Tuesday if Monday is a national holiday)
• Admission：Adults ￥500（400）／College Students ￥400（320）／High School and Junior High School Students, Over 65 ￥250（200）

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is delighted to present an exhibition of the work of the internationally famous photographer, KITAJIMA Keizo, who specializes in producing street scenes from major cities around the world. KITAJIMA Keizo is currently acclaimed for his serene photographic works in which he uses a large-format camera to take fixed-point photographs of people or landscapes that are highly sought after by museums and galleries both in Japan and overseas. He first became involved in photography in 1975 when he attended MORIYAMA Daido’s ‘Workshop Photography School’, which led to an interest in street photography. In that same year, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War, he photographed the Koza district of Okinawa, then followed this by traveling to Tokyo, New York, Eastern Europe and finally the Soviet Union in 1991, prior to its collapse, taking a vast number of snapshots of people’s lives during the Cold War period. This exhibition will consist of approximately 190 photographs featuring ‘Koza’, ‘Tokyo’, ‘New York’, ‘Eastern Europe’ and ‘The Soviet Union’, dating from 1975 to 1991.

Koza
KITAJIMA Keizo first visited Okinawa in the summer of 1975, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War. Koza was an entertainment district that flourished by catering to the U.S. army, it still displayed the scars of Okinawa’s long occupation and KITAJIMA found himself strongly attracted to it, his first solo exhibition, ‘BC Street, Okinawa’ comprising of the photographs he took there. This marked the beginning of KITAJIMA’s career as a photographer. He subsequently traveled regularly between Tokyo and Okinawa, and in 1980 began to hold exhibitions on alternate months at the independent gallery, ‘Image Shop CAMP’, entitled ‘Shashin Tokkyubin—Okinawa’ (Photomail from Okinawa). However, during the course of his photography, he began to feel the existence of an insurmountable barrier that existed between the Okinawans, who had lived under occupation for a long time, and the inhabitants of the rest of Japan. The images he captured with his cool eye on the streets of Koza were too vivid and he felt the consequences of publishing them in book form were too great for a single, young Japanese to bear. He could not decide how he should show the pictures he took in Okinawa, and although he presented some in exhibitions, 4 small booklets, and magazine series, he never published them in book form.

Tokyo
Born in Nagano Prefecture, KITAJIMA Keizo moved to Tokyo to attend university, but unable to find anything that truly interested him academically, he participated in the second term of MORIYAMA Daido’s class at the ‘Workshop Photography School’. In 1976, after the closing of the ‘WORKSHOP’ photography school’, MORIYAMA joined with KITAJIMA and six others to establish the independent gallery, ‘Image Shop CAMP’. It was here that KITAJIMA based himself to begin his groundbreaking activities. From January 1979 he began to hold monthly exhibitions entitled ‘Shashin Tokkyubin—Tokyo’ (Photomail from Tokyo) while simultaneously publishing 12 booklets. He began to photograph the drunken uproar in Tokyo bars, and mercilessly captured images of the people he passed in the street, firmly establishing his reputation as a snapshooter. In addition, he developed a unique method of displaying his work, showing it in an impromptu fashion immediately after shooting it. First he fixed a roll of bromide paper to the wall then moving the enlarger along, he projected different images as he went. He then used a sponge to apply the developer and fixative, turning the gallery into a darkroom and presenting a performance that incorporated both display and processing. The ‘Image Shop CAMP’ was the origin of the ‘photographers’ gallery’ that KITAJIMA uses now as the base for his activities.

New York
Having become very conscious of the America that existed on the other side of the fence at military installations in Okinawa, KITAJIMA Keizo traveled to New York in 1981. Following on from his experiences in Okinawa and in of the poorer parts of the city, such as the East Village or Harlem, where the mixture of Afro-American, Caribbean and Hispanic cultures had given birth to the hip-hop culture of the eighties. He went out every night, capturing images of the young people in their extreme fashions as they headed for the numerous clubs in the area. During his first three-month stay, he shot 400 rolls of film and in his second six-month visit, 500—a total of 900 rolls or 35,000 frames. He snapped the pictures quickly from the hip without looking through the finder as he came across his subjects, using a flash to stress the outline of their figures. It was a desire ‘to come into contact with something toxic, to take photographs that would leak venom’, that drew him to this, the most dangerous area of the city at a time when law and order was much worse than it is today. In 1982 he published a book of photographs entitled ‘New York’ (Byakuya Shobo) for which he received the 8th Kimura Ihee Award the following year.

Eastern Europe
Working amid the bustle of New York, KITAJIMA Keizo ‘felt clearly the darkness that spread across the other side of the Atlantic’ and become strongly conscious of the cities of Eastern Europe. Returning from New York to Japan, he remained for less than six months before setting out for Germany in May 1983 where he lived in West Berlin for approximately one and a half years, using this as a base to visit the countries of
Eastern Europe. In contrast to the young people of New York, the expressions on the faces of the people he saw in Eastern Europe were stiff and dour. Bright lights and colorful commercial establishments were absent from the streets and heavy, historical buildings filled the backgrounds of his pictures. Compared to the bright sunshine or powerful light of the flash in New York, the snaps of Europe are filled with a cold light reflecting the grey skies. Nearly all the photographs are portraits showing the head and torso, shot from a low angle, without using the viewfinder and with no flash, relying on natural light. In the pictures, we can sense the respect he felt towards his subjects as a people. It is quite clear that quality of KITAJIMA Keizo’s street snaps underwent a change in Eastern Europe. The face becomes the main source of interest, and each person is depicted in portrait form.

Soviet Union
While KITAJIMA Keizo was traveling the world during the 1980s, the cold war structure was gradually dismantled. In 1991, he visited the 15 republics that comprised the Soviet Union over a period of 150 days. He says that when he first entered the country, he never imagined that it would be dismantled within a few months. After returning to Japan, he published a book entitled ‘A.D. 1991’, but this work did not include any photographs of the Soviet Union and the reason he gave for this was: ‘If I had published the pictures then, people would simply have said, “Oh, so this is what the inhabitants of the Soviet Union looked like before it collapsed”, and they would only have gained a superficial understanding. That is why I felt that I would wait at least 10 years, until everybody had forgotten what the Soviet Union was like, before publishing them. By so doing the people in the pictures will stand out more and I think that this is one of the functions of photography.’
The publication of these photographs marked the end of KITAJIMA Keizo’s career as a snapshooter and he ceased to exhibit the photographs he had taken up until that time. It was not until 16 years later, in 2007, that he held his ‘USSR 1991’ exhibition at the Nikon Salon, for which he received the 32nd INA Nobuo Award. Having waited for a suitable period before showing these works, he was praised as follows: ‘always speculating on time and place, and pondering on the relationship between photographs and memory, the artist has given birth to a valuable body of work.’