Setting Sun Writings By Japanese Photographers ((exclusive)) Official

Moriyama wrote about the end of an era in photography, using the setting sun as a metaphor for the death of traditional film.

In the words of the Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō: "The setting sun, alone, I find peace, / A world of fleeting dreams, / Vanishes with the sun."

: They championed a style known as are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, and out-of-focus).

In 1971, Araki published Sentimental Journey , a photographic record of his honeymoon with his wife, Yoko. When Yoko passed away in 1990, he published Winter Journey . setting sun writings by japanese photographers

In the early 1950s, the photographic world in Japan was dominated by debates over (realism). Photographers were torn between documenting the objective, social reality of postwar poverty and engaging with subjectivity.

: Araki’s writings defend his controversial intermingling of eros and thanatos (desire and death). He famously notes that photography is not an objective truth but a deeply personal, performative act shared intimately between the photographer and the subject.

Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers a seminal anthology edited by Ivan Vartanian , Akihiro Hatanaka, and Yutaka Kanbayashi Moriyama wrote about the end of an era

Essays on the deaths of his parents and "The Photo Apparatus Between Man and Woman" Takuma Nakahira "Self-Change in the Act of Shooting" and excerpts from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? Hiroshi Sugimoto

"Setting sun writings" are thus the most honest form of Japanese photography. They admit that light is temporary, that beauty is always observed at the moment of its vanishing, and that the best photograph is the one you take a moment too late, when the sun has already slipped below the edge of the world, leaving only the writing—the memory—behind.

If Moriyama is the scream and Sugimoto is the silence, Rinko Kawauchi is the whisper. Kawauchi has an almost supernatural ability to find the sacred in the mundane. Her sunsets are small, intimate affairs—reflected in a puddle on the sidewalk, caught in the curve of a glass, filtered through a child’s fingers. When Yoko passed away in 1990, he published Winter Journey

A central pillar of the writings in Setting Sun centers around the legendary, short-lived avant-garde magazine Provoke , founded in 1968. Photographers like and Daido Moriyama used both their images and their essays to declare war on conventional, pristine commercial photography and traditional photojournalism.

The core of Setting Sun lies in the immediate post-1945 era, a time when Japanese photographers grappled with a demolished landscape and a shattered national identity. The shift from a militarized society to a democratic, American-influenced one forced a complete reevaluation of what it meant to hold a camera. The Realism Debate and Beyond