Author(s): Yoshihiro Suzuki

PHOTOGRAPHY MONOGRAPHS | ALL THINGS JAPANESE | JAPANESE PHOTO BOOKS

As a young man who had just moved from the countryside to the metropolis of Osaka, Suzuki Yoshihiro started a new life as a company worker by treating himself to a Minolta SRI single-lens reflex camera.

In his free time, he wandered around the city, spontaneously and curiously photographing the urban landscape, in settings ranging from boulevards to shopping arcades and from the business district to traditional backstreets.

Suzuki refers to himself as an amateur photographer and his story is representative of the strong amateur photography movement in post-war Japan, which is for the most part unknown to the public, unlike the work of professional photographers who have been exhibited worldwide.

Suzuki’s early photographs came to light by pure coincidence: his son’s wife discovered the negatives and developed them as contact sheets.  More than fifty years after Suzuki’s photographs were taken, they are now finally being published as a photobook.