Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the return to "primitive" photographic practices in reaction to the dawn of the digital era in Japan. I argue for a material turn in artistic practice that coincides with the material turn in the theory in the 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the return to "primitive" photographic practices in reaction to the dawn of the digital era in Japan. From the pinhole camera to platinum prints, antiquarian approaches to photography spiked in the late 1980s and continue to flourish in the present day. Antiquarian photography is well represented in exhibitions and photobooks of the 1990s, but it also appears in how-to manuals and popular photography journals. New galleries have opened that are devoted entirely to originary forms of the camera and photographic practices. Thus, this paper considers not only the methods of celebrated photographers such as Yamanaka Nobuo, Miyamoto Ryūji and Takashi Homma, but also the perspective of amateur photographers, viewership and public reception. I argue that the contemporary appeal of antiquarian photography lies in both the tactility of the process itself - the construction of a camera obscura or the control over a print in the darkroom - as well as in the materiality of the final product. Both the process and the resulting photograph challenge the desensitized nature of the digital image and encourage sustained acts of creating and viewing photography.