Kitajima Keizo
from Photo Express, Tokyo

Artist Kitajima Keizo(Japanese, born 1954)Japanese, born 1954

CultureJapanese

Titles

from Photo Express, Tokyo

Date1979

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 8 × 11 3/8 in. (20.3 × 28.9 cm)
Sheet: 12 11/16 × 16 1/16 in. (32.3 × 40.8 cm)
Frame (outer) (ANW EXHIBITION FRAME): 16 5/8 × 20 5/8 × 1 3/4 in. (42.2 × 52.4 × 4.4 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund

Object number2014.710

Not on view

Explore Further

Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionIn 1975 Keizō Kitajima joined the Workshop Photo School (Workshop Shashin Gakkō), where he studied with Daidō Moriyama and established relationships with other eminent photographers. Although the Workshop would dissolve the next year, Kitajima made a place for himself in the Tokyo photography community and would go on to establish an alternative gallery space, Image Shop Camp, with Daidō Moriyama and Seiji Kurata in 1976. He built a photographic body of work focused on Tokyo that would culminate in a yearlong series of monthly solo exhibitions at Image Shop Camp in 1979, titled Photo Express: Tokyo. Kitajima embraced a style of high-contrast prints with haphazard compositions and disparate viewpoints to capture the explosive energy of the city. People are featured centrally in these photographs, distorted and fragmented yet together forming a chaotic, aggressive portrait of Tokyo. Like Moriyama, Kitajima developed an interest in the creative potential of photography’s reproducibility, but he took the notion of transformation in a very different direction, focusing on the layers of reproduction in his own work rather than the degeneration of cultural media.
ProvenanceArtist, Japan, 1979; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 2014
Exhibition History“For A New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979 Japan,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 8–July 12, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed on sheet verso in pencil: 1979 1/3 [signature]

Signed on sheet verso in pencil

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

If you have questions about this work of art or the MFAH Online Collection please contact us.