From the design desk to the darkroom: Japanese photography, 1959–1982

Between 1959 and the early 1980s, Japan did something no other country quite managed: it built the cameras the world used, and at the same time produced photographers who changed what a photograph could look like. A surprising number of them did not start behind a camera. They started at a drawing table, in an advertising agency or a design studio. Ikki Mitsuhashi was one of them.

1959: the camera and the studio

In 1959 Nippon Kogaku released the Nikon F, the single-lens reflex that became the working tool of photojournalists everywhere; Leitz, the maker of the Leica, did not introduce a reflex of its own until 1964. Within a decade Japanese companies — Nikon, Canon, Asahi Optical with its Pentax cameras, Olympus, Minolta, Mamiya — made most of the world's serious cameras.

The same year, the designers Yusaku Kamekura, Hiromu Hara and Ikko Tanaka founded the Nippon Design Center in Tokyo, backed by companies such as Asahi Beer and Toyota. It became the engine of Japanese corporate design. Mitsuhashi joined it in 1965, straight from the commercial-design course at Musashino Art School.

The agency as a school

Advertising in the 1960s was where a young Japanese photographer could find equipment, darkrooms, film and a salary. Nobuyoshi Araki joined the agency Dentsu as a commercial photographer in 1963 and stayed until 1972, using its facilities for his own work. Kishin Shinoyama worked in the photography division of Light Publicity while still a student and left in 1968 to go freelance.

Mitsuhashi's path ran through the same world from the design side. He was art director for Lufthansa German Airlines at Grey-Daiko from 1968 and for Kanebo cosmetics at JMS from 1970. His work in those years won the Nissenbi Special Selection, the Asahi, Mainichi and Nikkei advertising awards, the Dentsu Award and an ADC Bronze. In 1972 he founded his own studio, People Co., Ltd., and began to work as a photographer; in 1980 he closed the design side to photograph full time.

What the art director brings to the camera is visible in everything he made afterwards: one subject, placed with care against an empty ground, and nothing in the frame that does not need to be there.

1968: Provoke, and the other direction

Not everyone came from design; some came against it. In November 1968 the critic Koji Taki, the photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi and the poet Takahiko Okada published the first issue of Provoke, with Daido Moriyama joining for the second. Their grainy, blurred, tilted pictures — *are, bure, boke* — were a deliberate refusal of the clean, commercial image that the agencies produced. Provoke lasted three issues. Its influence has lasted fifty years.

In 1972 the Tokyo publisher Shashin Hyoronsha issued two of the era's landmark books, Moriyama's *Bye Bye Photography* and Shomei Tomatsu's *I Am a King*. The following year, the same house published Mitsuhashi's first photobook, Star Man.

Galleries owned by camera makers

One feature of Japanese photography still surprises visitors: many of its most important exhibition spaces were opened by camera and film companies. Asahi Optical opened the Pentax Gallery in Roppongi in 1967; Nippon Kogaku opened the Nikon Salon in Ginza in January 1968. They were not showrooms for the maker's products: the Nikon Salon, for one, charges photographers nothing, selects its exhibitions from open applications, and is open to work made with any camera.

Mitsuhashi showed there twice: *Shoot Me* at the Pentax Gallery in 1980, and *Long Long Long Beach* in 1982, the year the book of the same name appeared. His later solo show *Water Portrait* went to Gallery P3 in Tokyo in 1991 and to Gallery Arteam in Fukuoka in 1996.

The photobook as the finished work

In Europe and America, the finished form of a photograph was usually the exhibition print. In Japan it was often the book. Photographers sequenced, designed and published their own photobooks, and the book, not the print, was the work. That is why, when Martin Parr and Gerry Badger published *The Photobook: A History* from 2004, and Manfred Heiting and Ryuichi Kaneko surveyed *The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990* in 2017, Japanese books took up so much of the story.

For a designer-photographer the book was natural ground. Mitsuhashi published three: *Star Man* (1973), *Long Long Long Beach* (1982) and *Elvis My Happiness* (1994).

What the path still teaches

For a photographer working in Japan today, the designers who became photographers offer three plain lessons.

• Composition is a transferable skill. The discipline of the layout — hierarchy, space, one idea per page — is the discipline of the frame.
• Make the book. A sequenced body of work in print outlasts any feed, and it is the form in which Japanese photography is remembered.
• Use the open walls. Galleries run by camera makers, such as the Nikon Salon, still choose exhibitions from open applications.

Mitsuhashi's last long series, Tropical Garden, began in Ubud, Bali in 2003. It is still a designer's photography: a single plant, a vessel, a pale wall, and light.

Sources

• Nippon Design Center, company history
• Nikon Salon, history; Ricoh Imaging, Pentax history
• MoMA, Provoke, 1968–1970
• Steidl, The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990
• The artist's biography, from *Long Long Long Beach* (1982) and his own record, on our About page