Publisher
Category
Information
- Hardcover
- 224 pages
- 210 x 295 mm
- ISBN 9784865412314
- Japanese, English
- Jul 2026
The first edition of this book was published in conjunction with Eiko Yamazawa’s first posthumous retrospective, organized by the Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2019 to mark the 120th anniversary of her birth.
In recent years, Yamazawa’s work has received growing international attention through exhibitions such as I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now. Against this backdrop of renewed interest, this book focuses on her abstract photographic series What I Am Doing, produced in the 1970s and 1980s in both color and black-and-white, while also reproducing her seminal 1962 photobook Far and Near, which reveals the origins of her abstract practice.
Born in Osaka in 1899, Eiko Yamazawa studied photography in the United States in the 1920s and opened a portrait studio in Osaka in 1931 as the first female professional photographer in Japan.
After retiring in 1960, she devoted herself to abstract color photography, developing a highly conceptual and experimental body of work. However, Yamazawa’s work has never been examined in detail before, because her distinctive style had nothing in common with the mainstream of Japanese photography.
As a result, she has been largely forgotten since her death in 1995. The main purpose of this book is therefore to situate her work in the history of photography beyond a national framework by examining her career in relation to American photography.
Consisting of four chapters, the book is organized in reverse chronological order to explore the background of Yamazawa’s abstract photography. The first chapter features Yamazawa’s abstract photography series What I Am Doing from the 1970s and 1980s, which includes highly conceptual and self-reflexive pieces in which she shot her camera supplies as well as re-photographing her work from the past.
The second chapter reproduces Yamazawa’s 1962 photo book Far and Near in its entirety, while the third presents examples of American photography that she was exposed to, and the last examines her early portraits and related documents to clarify the starting point.
This composition allows us to trace Yamazawa’s long career as a photographic artist who continued to pursue a path distinct from the mainstream of Japanese photography.
Featuring 158 plates, the volume spans Yamazawa’s entire career, bringing together early portraits, photographs from her wartime evacuation, archival documents, and works that reveal her engagement with modern American photography.In addition to essays by two curators based on recent research, the volume reprints three essays written by Yamazawa in the 1920s and 1950s, and concludes with a detailed biography and bibliography.
“When I returned to Japan, I was determined not to make the same sort of work as everyone else because I felt that I had to improve Japanese photography. That feeling is still what drives me today. Twenty-five years have passed since then. So much has happened in that time. Even major things like war. But I’ve never stepped away from my photography work. “
Excerpt from the text “Forty Years as a Woman Photographer”
*A Path
The path into the unknown
The path I walk today
Far
Near
A single path
Eiko Yamazawa
from the text “Abstract Photographs” (1986 )
Publisher
Category
Information
- Hardcover
- 224 pages
- 210 x 295 mm
- ISBN 9784865412314
- Japanese, English
- Jul 2026
