KYOTO, Japan -- Somewhere between the pull of nostalgia and the call of posterity, documentary photographers ply their trade, capturing for the ages what are often candid, unstaged moments of everyday life whose full resonance may sometimes only be revealed long after they have been preserved on film -- or, nowadays, on digital memory cards.
Given that Tokyo has long been the center of Japan's mass media and book publishers, and of the country's art market, too, it was in the capital that many modern Japanese photography movements emerged and flourished. Appearing in magazines and books, the most inventive photographers' work -- that of such artists as Eikoh Hosoe (born 1933), Kikuji Kawada (born 1933), Daido Moriyama (born 1938), the Surrealist photo-collagist Toshiko Okanoue (born 1928), Shomei Tomatsu (1930-2012), among many others -- became known and influential.
