Power Made Visible
Photography and Postwar Japan's Elusive Reality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3653829 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Julia Adeney Thomas (0000-0002-0374-9776, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 02 |
| Publication date | 2008-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0021911808000648 |
| OpenAlex | W2163361942 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 12 |
Despite the impact of the Allied occupation (1945–52), Japanese photography in the immediate postwar period was neither “art” nor “documentary” by American definitions. Instead, as the vigorous 1953 debate over “realism” shows, photographers such as Domon Ken and critics such as Tanaka Masao and Watanabe Kosho insisted that photography—at least real photography—was a political practice. It was political not because its aesthetic accomplishments bolstered national prestige in the arts nor because it provided visual evidence for public policies by documenting social conditions. A real photograph, whether of a beauty, a beggar, or a bourgeois, attempted to make manifest a reality often invisible to the naked eye: the reality of power and how power ought to work after Japan's defeat. These photographic practices show us that postwar conditions were so unsettled that the very nature of social reality—what it was, how one should see it, what one could hope for—was still undefined. By participating in the ideological effort to “constitute reality,” photography in Japan sought to establish political, social, and aesthetic norms that were taken for granted elsewhere
Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Bourgeoisie · Ideology · Period (music) · Photography · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Prestige · Realism · Social reality · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture
Pacific Exposures
Nakahira Takuma's ‘Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?’ (1973) and the quest for ‘true’ photographic realism in post-war Japan
Visualizing Fascism
Please Walk on This
Mnemoculture and National Museum
Visualising the Modern Housewife
Present perfect cinema and the implicated subject
Five Faces of Fascism
Discourses of the Coming
Visible cultures, invisible politics
Re-staging postwar Japanese photography
Tokiwa Toyoko, the nude shooting session, and the gendered optics of Japanese postwar photography
Maps of Life and Abjection
| Citations per year | 0.93 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2025 (14) |
| Highly cited | No |