Thinking Japanese Photography

3:00pm, Sat 27 Jan 2024

Gain a broader historical and conceptual context to Daido Moriyama's life and work in this two-day event

This event is part of our Past Programme

In the first of this two-day event coinciding with the final weeks of his retrospective, we will look at the broader historical and conceptual context for Daido Moriyama's work. What can his practice tell us about the Japanese photography more broadly? How does it reflect the major shifts in discourse over the last 50 years and why does it continue to resonate today?

Contributors include Jennifer Coates, Lena Fritsch and William Schaefer.

Curated by Jelena Stojković. Produced in partnership with the Photography Research Group at the Centre of Research in the Arts (CoRA), Oxford Brookes University.

Schedule

Jennifer Coates
The Past is Always New: Memorialising Japanese Creatives Through Documentary

William Schaefer
Fossils of Light and Time’: On Returning to the Nature of Photography’s Surfaces

Lena Fritsch
Stray Dog in Tokyo: How Moriyama Daidō Made Photo History

Biographies

Jennifer Coates is Professor of Japanese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (Hong Kong University Press 2016) and Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters on cinema and audiences in postwar and contemporary Japan. Jennifer is a AHRC Innovation Scholar and recipient of the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts.

Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum and teaches at the University of Oxford. She was co-curator of the 2022 Roppongi Crossing triennial of contemporary Japanese art at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. She previously held curatorial roles at Tate Modern and the National Museums in Berlin. Fritsch’s publications on Japanese photography include Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (2018 and 2024), Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021), an English-language version of Moriyama Daidō’s Tales of Tono (2012) and The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (2011). Fritsch holds a PhD from Bonn University, and also studied at Keio University, Tokyo.

William Schaefer is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies and Visual Culture at Durham University, and is the author of Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925-1937 (2017). He is writing a book, Photographic Ecologies, on how in China, Japan and the West, the medium of photography stages fundamental questions of the relations between nature and culture, particularly in the present moment of ecological crisis and mass displacement. Essays from this project have been published in October, ASAP/Journal and Representations.