Kazuo Kitai: Funabashi Story

Photographer Kazuo Kitai produced provocative works that confronted the front lines of the times in the 1960s, such as "Resistance," which captured the protests against the docking of nuclear submarines in Yokosuka, and "Radical Barricades," which documented the student movement calling for university democratization. He continued to maintain a consistent gaze that closely follows social change and people's lives through his masterpieces, such as "To the Village" and "A Landscape I Once Saw."

The photo book "Funabashi Story" is a collection of works capturing the landscape of Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, primarily in the 1980s. The project began in response to a request from the Funabashi City government, whose population was rapidly increasing at the time, to "take photographs of the town and its people," but the photographs contained in this book are an extension of Kitai's own daily life there. A notable feature of this work is that it is both a record of his personal life and, ultimately, a document of an era.

Kitai turned his attention to everyday life in and around urban areas, walking around the city and painstakingly interviewing and photographing the atmosphere of the people living there. In contrast to his previous rural photographs in "To the Village," light streams in through large windows in housing complexes and new residential areas, and the presence of objects and people feels light and airy - just as Kitai himself describes this feeling, this work depicts scenes of urban life clad in "brightness" and "lightness."

There are no dramatic events. However, the quiet accuracy of the images captures the lives of people living, gathering, and passing time in the suburbs of a city in the 1980s, a time of great change. This book clearly captures the everyday scenes of Kazuo Kitai's approach, which is to keenly sense the changing times and faithfully release his shutter.

[Title] Funabashi Story
[Publisher] Rokko Publishing
[Publication date] February 28, 1989 (first edition)
[Number of pages] Unpaginated
[Size] Approx. 21.8 x 16.0cm
[Format] Hardcover
[Title Reading] Funabashi Story
[Author/Editor, etc.] Kazuo Kitai/Author
[Printing] Keiseisha Printing/Printing, Dai Nippon Printing/Binding
[ISBN] 4-8453-6040-3 C0072
[Condition] Used [4] Below average (cover small scratches, small stains on three sides, slight discoloration)
[Accessories] None (Obi missing)
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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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