In Tate Modern
- Artist
- Osamu Shiihara 1905 – 1974
- Medium
- Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 255 × 304 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Acquisitions Committee 2022
- Reference
- P82698
Summary
This photographic work by Japanese photographer Osamu Shiihara is an abstract photogram, made by casting light momentarily on objects placed on photographic paper. The result is an image crossed with white lines, some very sharp and others slightly blurred. There are also three circular shapes in the photograph, two black and one completely white with two concentric rings. Shiihara’s practice was defined by experimentation, and he used a variety of techniques including solarisation, double exposures, photograms and the combination of drawing and photography, which he called photo peinture.
Shiihara was a member of the progressive photography group Tampei Photography Club. Formed in Osaka in 1930 and including members such as Yasui Nakaji (1903–1942) and Hirai Terushichi (1900–1970), the group was interested in exploring the medium as an artistic experimental means to pursue avant-garde expressions such as abstraction and surrealism. The club was among the major forces in creating Japan’s new photography movement. In some ways, their championing of the technical capacities of photography can be compared to the German New Vision movement and the group members were likely influenced by the landmark Film und Foto exhibition which, touring internationally from Stuttgart in 1929 and presented in Osaka in 1931, catalysed new ideas around photography across the globe. This photograph thus shows Shiihara’s mastery of modern photographic techniques and the simultaneous occurrence of modernist avant-garde photography, which was blossoming across Europe, the United States and Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Unlike his training in Western (oil) painting, photography allowed Shiihara to reject realism in favour of technological experimentation, as discussed by the artist’s son, Tamotsu Shiihara: ‘[My father] has been noted to have said that photography “should not keep going down the same path as painting”. The puzzle then is no longer a mystery. I now understand that in regard to painting, he believed in the reality through seeing, and in photography, the imagination itself that can be seen, and brought those things into shape.’ (Quoted in Osamu Shiihara 2018, unpaginated.)
This photograph is a unique print and so is not editioned. It was likely made in Osaka, where Shiihara returned after studying painting in Tokyo. It lacks a precise date, but the artist’s estate has confirmed that it was printed some time in the 1930s, whilst Shiihara was a member of Tampei Photography Club (1930–41).
Further reading
Ryuichi Kaneko (ed.) The Tampei Photography Club and Modern Photography in Japan, Tokyo 2016.
Osamu Shiihara, Tokyo 2018.
Emma Jones
September 2020
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