Re-staging postwar Japanese photography: Ōtsuji Kiyoji, APN and straight photography

Abstract

In both English and Japanese-language scholarship, Domon Ken’s ‘realism photography’ grounds the history of photography in postwar Japan. Domon proclaimed that photographs should deal directly with social phenomena, and that photography should never mix with other media. This essay introduces an alternative to Domon’s realism, through a series of abstract, studio-based photographs that were published in the pages of the popular magazine Asahi Graph between 1953 and 1954. The photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji (1923–2001) produced this series (collectively known as the APN photographs) in collaboration with other artists, while simultaneously criticizing Domon’s dogma in print. This essay argues that Domon’s ‘realism photography’ should be reconceived as a form of straight photography, a tradition of modernist purism couched in a moral language that also reflects heterosexual anxiety over the stability of identity. The APN photographs themselves play with the conventions of realistic representation, and the critical nature of Ōtsuji’s writing remains unexplored in scholarship to date. Shifting attention towards Ōtsuji loosens the hold of realism on postwar photography in Japan, and also brings the conditions of prewar photography into view.