The October 1976 special edition of Asahi Camera features Kitai Kazuo, one of Japan's leading postwar photographers, whose masterpiece, "To the Village," quietly captures the daily life of rural villages in the 1970s.
"To the Village," included in this book, is Kitai's masterpiece, which won the first Kimura Ihei Photography Award, and is an important work that will remain in the history of photography.
This series, which ran for 24 issues in Asahi Camera from 1974 to 1975, deliberately chose the location of a "village" in an era of accelerating urbanization, and drew a great deal of attention for its meticulous capture of mundane everyday scenes such as "After the Rice Harvest," "Hot Springs," "In the Snow," and "Obon." The perspective of focusing on "life itself," without any special incidents or dramatic moments, was new at the time and still has an enduring power today.
As he shifted his focus from documenting the student movement to the lives of farmers, Kitai discovered his unique approach to "photographing people's everyday lives." This approach is most condensed and refined in "To the Village," which has been re-edited and exhibited many times in subsequent years, and continues to be read by many readers.
This is a valuable record of rural life before it was swept away by the changing times, and can be seen as the starting point of Kazuo Kitai's life's work. It is a book that evokes the origins of photography.
●The winning work of the 1st Kimura Ihei Photography Award
[Title] Asahi Camera October 1976 Special Issue -Kazuo Kitai "To the Village"-
[Publisher] Asahi Shimbun
[Date of publication] October 10, 1976
[Number of pages] 278 pages
[Size] Approx. 25.8 x 18.0 x 1.6 cm
[Format] Softcover
[Title reading] Asahi Camera 1976 10th October 1976 Kitai Kazuo Murahe
[Author/Editor, etc.] Kazuo Kitai/Author
[printing]
[ISBN] None
[Condition] Used [5] Average (cover scuffs, overall slight fading over time)
[Accessories] None
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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).
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