Photography as “Anonymous Document”: The Formation of a New Realism of Photography in the Late 1960s and Early 70s Japan

Abstract

This article explores an emergence of a new concept of photography, “anonymous document” in the late 1960s and early ‘70s Japan. In this period, a group of young postwar photographers, namely Tomatsu Shomei, Naito Masatoshi, Nakahira Takuma, and Taki Koji proposed to regard photography only as “anonymous documents” instead of “individual expressions.” Through tracing the formation of this new concept of photography, this article asks about the historicity of this term instead of treating it as a technologically guaranteed nature of photography. For this purpose, the study analyzes the pivotal exhibition “Hundred Years of [Japanese] Photography” (1968), through which the concept of “anonymous document” was constructed, along with other related publications. firstly, I highlight the sworn opposition between the postwar young photographers and wartime photographers, such as Kimura Ihei, Watanabe Yoshio, and Domon Ken. Secondly, I also investigate a shared discourse between the two groups. I particularly focus on the premise of the subjectivity of photographers as observers to which the postwar photographers presumably hold on. Through this process, this article first questions the conventional understanding of the epistemological shift between prewar and postwar photographers. Secondly, it challenges the understanding of the concept of “documentality” as a nature of the medium, alternatively illustrates it as a historically constructed discourse.