Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the postwar Japanese photobook offers a radical conception of the materiality of the photograph. The technical innovations and design experiments of the period posit a multisensory photographic theory, one rooted in the physical and sensorial experience of the reader's body.

Paper long abstract:

From the late 1950s through the 1970s, the rise in the production of Japanese photobooks signaled radical new conceptions of the photograph as a material object. Innovative book designs, technical experimentation, and collaborative projects from this period in the history of the postwar Japanese photobook allowed for more expansive notions of the viewer-image relationship, and for multisensory theories of the photograph. Through sustained analysis of case studies of seminal photobooks such as Hosoe Eikoh's Barakei [Ordeal by Roses] (1963), Kawada Kikuji's Chizu [The Map] (1965), and Takanashi Yutaka's Toshi-e [Towards the City] (1974), this paper will argue for the significance of postwar Japanese photobooks as material objects whose meanings and messages are deeply imbricated in the subjective perceptual experience of the reader/viewer. Fundamentally different from the photobook publications of the early postwar period, which owed a debt to prewar traditions and theories of hōdō shashin ("news photography") and kumi shashin ("photo groups," or "photo essays"), the second generation of postwar photobooks eschewed the idea that photographs and text could be bound together in clear and objective narratives. Instead, through their revolutionary designs, unstable images, and underlying theories of the role of the photograph in society, these publications posit a multisensory, contingent relationship with the reader: a relationship in which the physical reality and the perceptual experience of the reader's body are a fundamental component of the photobook's existence as material object.