Dates：Aug 12－Sep 17, 2011
[Summer holidays: Aug 9-29; Open on Aug 12,13,19,26 and 27]
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film (Roppongi, Tokyo)

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Taka Ishii Photography/Film and Zen Photo Gallery is pleased to co-present a joint exhibition of Ichiro Kojima from Friday 12 August to Saturday 17 September. This exhibition will showcase approximately 30 modern prints from Kojima’s representative series of work, Tsugaru.

Kojima (b. 1924, Aomori, Japan) served the war effort in China during World War II and returned to his homeland, Aomori, in 1946. Having passed through several jobs, he began to help out in the family business, a photographic equipment shop. He participated in an amateur photography group (Hokuyoukai), and began to make extensive photographic work during this time. His short, decade long span of activity until his death in 1964 at the young age of 40 has left a noteworthy legacy in photographic history. Tsugaru, the series in this exhibition, was shot during Kojima’s first four years as a photographer; it may be said that it was during this time he worked on Tsugaru where Kojima developed his characteristic printing technique.

“For Kojima, Tsugaru’s farming and fishing villages represented by Jyusanmura was symbolic of the decadent exhaustion that was modernization in postwar Japan. Perhaps what Kojima saw the fact that he saw the image of “his returnee self” within these scenes and the subliminal experience of saving himself from the gloom of destruction amidst the ruins of Tsugaru Fields, as a pertaining point in the necessity of shooting Tsugaru. To Kojima, this was embodied in the selective angles, calculated composition, and delicate handling of the prints in the darkroom, which manifest on the photographic paper…The images of what drew Kojima back to life—the nature and the farmers who inhabit Tsugaru, are photographically transcribed here on the photographic paper with the same impact that hit Kojima himself. This must have been his experiment in Tsugaru.”
– Excerpt from “Photographing the North—Ichiro Kojima Theories”, Shigemi Takahashi, Ichiro Kojima Photography Collection, Inscript, 2009

This is an opportunity to see Ichiro Kojima’s work, which has been increasingly exposed lately through monographs and exhibitions.

Also, please note that Zen Photo Gallery is only open on Fridays and Saturdays between the period of 12 August and 27 August.

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