Kazuo Kitai: 1970s NIPPON (Signed)

"Japan in the 1970s" is a collection of works by Kitai Kazuo, one of Japan's leading postwar photographers.
This book brings together Kitai's photographic expressions, which have always been at the forefront of the times and the lives of people, including ``Resistance,'' which documents the struggles of the 1960s, and his masterpiece ``To the Village,'' which he photographed while traveling to rural areas that were becoming increasingly depopulated in the shadow of rapid economic growth.

This book is the definitive edition of "To the Village," a photo collection that the artist himself has reselected and re-edited from 2,545 negatives taken between 1973 and 1981.
In addition to the images included in the original "To the Village," which was published as a special edition of "Asahi Camera" in 1976 and as the Tankosha edition in 1980, the book has been reconstructed to include previously unpublished works, and has been presented with a new title: "Japan in the 1970s."

In the 1970s, Japan's rural society underwent major transformation due to rapid urbanization and labor outflow. Kitai records with a dispassionate, unexaggerated perspective the process by which agricultural-based communities and human relationships crumbled, and landscapes and lifestyles that were once "natural" were lost.
What is depicted is not a special event, but the "ordinary lives of ordinary people" who lived there at the time, but many of these people have already disappeared, and now the only scenes left are in photographs.

This book replaces the Asahi Camera special edition and Tankosha edition of "To the Village," which are now difficult to obtain, and is an important photo collection that allows both past and new readers to learn about the full picture of "To the Village."
This is one of Kitai Kazuo's achievements, quietly conveying the end of the 1970s and the disappearance of Japan's original landscape.

[Title] 1970s Nippon
[Publisher] Touseisha
[Publication date] July 10, 2001 (first edition)
[Number of pages] 228 pages
[Size] Approx. 24.5 x 18.5 x 3.5 cm
[Format] Softcover
[Title reading] 1970 Year in Japan
[Author/Editor] Kazuo Kitai/Author, Akira Tokuda/Design
[Printing] Tokyo Inshokan/Printing, Takayanagi Noboru/Printing Director
[ISBN] 4-924725-78-1 C0072
[Condition] Used [5] Average (Cover slightly wrinkled)
[Accessories] None
[Featured books]
[Related Exhibitions]

Kazuo Kitai (1944-)

Born in Anshan, China in 1944.
In 1965, he dropped out of the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art, and in the same year self-published his early masterpiece, Resistance (Miraisha).
In 1969, he interviewed farmers in Sanrizuka who were opposed to the construction of Narita Airport, and the resulting photo collection, Sanrizuka (Norasha, 1972), won him the Newcomer Award from the Photographic Society of Japan.

He won the first Kimura Ihei Photography Award in 1976 for his series "To the Village," which ran serially in Asahi Camera from 1974 to 1975. Since then, he has been highly acclaimed both at home and abroad, and continues to have a major presence as one of Japan's leading postwar photographers.

His major exhibitions include "Time Tunnel Series Vol. 20: Kitai Kazuo - The Form of Photography and the Times" (Guardian Garden, 2004) and "Landscapes I Once Saw" (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2012).
His major photo books include To the Village (Tankosha, 1980), New World Stories (Choseisha, 1981), Funabashi Story (Rokuko Publishing, 1989), Landscapes I Once Saw (Sokkyosha, 1990), Nippon in the 1970s (Toseisha, 2001), A Journey of Drifting Clouds (Wise Publishing, 2016), and The Age of Radicals (Heibonsha, 2020).

< Related Figures >

Kazuo Kitai