In Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture, there was a photographer named Ken Domon. He is one of the photographers who represent 20th-century Japan.
Realist photography
Ken Domon established "realist photography," which captures reality as it is without staging. He expressed his thinking in the phrase "absolutely unstaged, absolute snapshots." A figure who led the postwar photography world, he is sometimes called "the demon of documentary photography."
He was born in Sakata in 1909 and died in 1990. He left many works addressed to society, such as Hiroshima, which documented the atomic-bombed city.
Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples, a life's work
Among Ken Domon's major works is Koji Junrei (Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples). It is a series in which he kept photographing old temples and Buddhist statues across Japan; the first volume appeared in 1963, and it was completed with the fifth volume in 1975. It is counted among his representative works.
With a way of shooting that moves in close on just one part of a statue, he captured even the texture of wood and stone and the accumulation of time.
Entrusting everything to his hometown
When Ken Domon became the first honorary citizen of Sakata City, he donated all of his works to his hometown. In response, in 1983, the Ken Domon Memorial Museum (now the Ken Domon Museum of Photography) opened as Japan's first museum dedicated to photography.
Returning all of your work to the land where you were born. There is something to learn as an artist from that choice.
I also paint in Yamagata. That this land had someone like Ken Domon, who looked at reality so thoroughly, supports me as I keep making my work.
Mermaid nao's commissioned art is not photography, but in looking closely at the person in front of me, I learn from Ken Domon's stance.
Sources
Ken Domon Museum of Photography, Sakata City, Yamagata (Ken Domon and his work / Ken Domon Award)
Sakata City official website (Ken Domon Museum of Photography)
FUJIFILM SQUARE (Photographer profile: Ken Domon)
Wikipedia (Ken Domon)
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