Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kiyohiko-komura-14424" aria-label="More by Kiyohiko Komura" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Kiyohiko Komura</a>
Presented by Jacqui Brantjes and Daniel Pittack 2010
architecture
building - non-specific
cloth
emotions, concepts and ideas
fence
formal qualities
miscellaneous
objects
pavement
photographic
townscapes / man-made features
<p>This untitled gelatin silver print depicts a street in Japan in the late 1940s. Just off centre is a square white cloth hanging from a wooden trellis on the outside of a traditional Japanese building. In the foreground, the pavement and gutter are visible. This photograph demonstrates Komura’s interest in picturing abstract forms created by everyday objects, a characteristic tendency of modernist photography at the time.</p>
paper print photograph gelatin silver
18 February 2011 – 15 April 2012
2012-04-15
18 February 2011 – 15 April 2012
2012-04-15
2011-02-18
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2011-02-18
Japanese Photography
Collection based display
14 October 2014 – 10 May 2015
2015-05-10
14 October 2014 – 10 May 2015
2015-05-10
2014-10-14
Tate St Ives (St Ives, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/
2014-10-14
The Modern Lens: International Photography and the Tate Collection
Exhibition
Untitled
support & image: 254 × 303 mm

Presented by Jacqui Brantjes and Daniel Pittack 2010
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<p>This untitled gelatin silver print depicts a street in Japan in the late 1940s. Just off centre is a square white cloth hanging from a wooden trellis on the outside of a traditional Japanese building. In the foreground, the pavement and gutter are visible. This photograph demonstrates Komura’s interest in picturing abstract forms created by everyday objects, a characteristic tendency of modernist photography at the time.</p>
<p>Born in Nagoya in 1899, Kiyohiko Komura was an amateur photograph and worked for Todai Bank until the great Showa depression of 1929. Camera clubs and magazines for both amateur and professional photographers were cultivated in Nagoya where, in 1936, Shuntaro Narita launched a magazine called <i>Camera Man</i>. It published images taken by photographers associated with the Nagoya and Kansai photography clubs, including pictures by Komura, who was an active member of such clubs, and works by Niryu Nagata and Yoshio Namiki. Renowned Japanese photographer Minayoshi Takada joined the editorial team and the magazine promoted avant-garde photography trends by introducing the work of Yasui Nakaji and Yoshio Shimozato among others. In November 1940, censorship put an end to the magazine.</p>
<p>Komura served in the army during the Second World War but continued to take photographs and make drawings while travelling around Japan and China. After the war Komura resumed his photographic experiments and worked as a photographer documenting Nagoya’s architectural heritage.</p>
<p>Komura’s photographic work has its roots in the modernist movements of the 1930s when many photographers attempted to produce abstract formal compositions from everyday objects and materials by simply manipulating light and shadows in the darkroom. By the late 1940s, and under the influence of other forms of abstract art, photographic work of this kind began to be described as ‘Subjective Photography’. The German photographer Otto Steinert was the most well-known theorist of this type of photography and, although it is not known whether Komura was influenced directly by Steinert or his ideas, the Japanese photographer’s work shares many characteristics with Steinert’s.</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>R. Kaneko, N. Matsumoto, D. Klochko, <i>Modern Photography in Japan 1915–1940</i>, Carmel, California 2001.<br/>Anne Tucker (ed.), <i>The History of Japanese Photography</i>, New Haven and London 2003.<br/>
<i>Sashin Ni Kaere, Return to Photography: Japanese Photography of the 1930s</i>, exhibition catalogue, Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo 2010.</p>
<p>Inès de Bordas<br/>March 2012</p>
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Summary
2012-08-02T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
architecture building - non-specific cloth emotions, concepts and ideas fence formal qualities miscellaneous objects pavement photographic townscapes / man-made features