Hiromi Tsuchida

From Engineering to Photography

Hiromi Tsuchida graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at Fukui University, then studied in the evening program at the Tokyo College of Photography while working at a Pola Cosmetics research laboratory. He left the company in 1971 to become a full-time photographer.^*12 He has recalled candidly that photography initially seemed easier to enter than painting because pressing the shutter at least produced an image.^*11 What kept him with photography, however, was the opposite experience. Photographs did not come back as he had imagined or as he thought he had seen; the discrepancy made him realize “how little I actually see,” and that discovery interested him.^*11 Comparing what he believed he had seen with what the photograph actually contained became a reason to keep working with the medium.

High-Speed Growth and Zokushin

Tsuchida came into his own as a photographer in the 1970s, a period he describes both as “political” and as one of intense economic change, when Japanese society as a whole was moving toward “discarding the past.”^*1 As urban capital and ways of life spread into regional Japan during the years of high-speed growth, the differences between city and countryside narrowed quickly. Tsuchida deliberately moved against that current, turning to local festivals and communities in order to reconsider the culture and environment that had formed him. SFMOMA likewise places Zokushin within a search for ways of life not yet fully homogenized by capital flowing out from the cities, while noting that the photographs also register signs of tourism beginning to flatten the difference between urban and rural Japan.^*13 Tsuchida did not point his camera toward an “old Japan” simply to preserve vanishing customs. He wanted to see what was being discarded as Japan changed rapidly, through bodies, clothing, festivals, and gestures that still remained.

Autistic Space and the “Failed” Photograph

In Autistic Space, which received the Taiyo Award in 1971, Tsuchida says that among the many negatives he made in Asakusa he deliberately selected photographs he considered “failures.” Frustrated by the straightforward documentary quality of pictures that were properly exposed and focused, he wanted his own interpretation to remain visible in the image.^*11 The approach continued into Zokushin, but Tsuchida later recalled that as he intensified missed focus and blur, he cast a “net” of his own image over the subject until the subject’s reality itself began to disappear.^*11 In the Hiroshima work that began alongside this impasse, he made what he called a “180-degree” turn: he subdued his own taste and gave greater priority to the camera’s capacity to record.^*11 The frontal clarity of his later photographs of people and objects in Hiroshima did not grow from an original faith in “objective photography.” It was a method he chose after deciding that an overemphasis on his own style through blur and missed focus had made the subject itself harder to see.

Koen Shigemori and PROVOKE

At the Tokyo College of Photography, Tsuchida studied under the critic Koen Shigemori. He recalls that because Shigemori explicitly criticized PROVOKE, the students felt that they had already “gone beyond” it.^*11 At the same time, Tsuchida acknowledges that the 1960s and 1970s were years in which established forms and institutions were being challenged in both politics and photography, and that he worked on “the same kind of ground” as the circle around PROVOKE.^*11 MoMA’s 1974 exhibition New Japanese Photography included Tsuchida alongside Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Masatoshi Naito, and others.^*15 Tsuchida’s later direction, however, was not to intensify the force of a rough photographic surface. After using blur and missed focus in Autistic Space and Zokushin to inscribe his own way of seeing, he concluded that his manner could instead obscure the subject. In Hiroshima he reversed course, photographing the subject frontally and clearly and supplying the necessary past through text. The visual manner he had intensified in Autistic Space and Zokushin became something he deliberately suppressed in Hiroshima.

Zokushin

Tsuchida began photographing Zokushin around Japan in 1968, but the series is not an ethnographic catalog of festivals and folk beliefs.^*10 He has explained that although he initially intended to photograph rituals, his interest gradually shifted toward the participants themselves.^*1 When the camera is raised, people smile, pose, and sometimes perform more emphatically. Tsuchida kept those reactions in the picture. The photograph therefore contains not just an inherited form of festival but also a person in the present who smiles, braces, or performs because a camera is there. In the Smithsonian’s Entertainer, Asakusa, from Zokushin, the figure’s gesture does not remain still as an ethnographic specimen; it comes forward as a response to being photographed.^*4

Counting Grains of Sand

In Zokushin, Tsuchida kept people who performed back to the camera. In Counting Grains of Sand, he did almost the opposite: he kept photographing until no one in the crowd was looking at him. He has described using a wide-angle lens, refusing to fix attention on a single face or event, seeing the whole frame as a “plane” rather than a collection of “points,” and allowing the camera to record things he had not consciously noticed.^*7 He continued releasing the shutter until the group broke apart, then chose photographs in which the photographer’s presence had been ignored. The aim was to let the camera register arrangements of people that his own field of vision could not apprehend at once. SFMOMA describes the book as moving from a few scattered figures toward crowds that fill the frame, culminating in people gathered in front of the Imperial Palace after the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989.^*2 The method of photographing reactions to the camera in Zokushin and the method of waiting until the camera has been forgotten in Counting Grains of Sand are nearly opposite approaches within the work of the same photographer.

Turning toward Hiroshima

By the time Tsuchida turned toward Hiroshima, Japanese photography already included Ken Domon’s records centered on hibakusha, the personal and symbolic imagery Shomei Tomatsu developed in 11:02 Nagasaki, and Kenji Ishiguro’s Hiroshima Now, which approached the past from the present. A research bulletin from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum notes that Tsuchida was deeply affected by Tomatsu’s work as a student, yet by the time he approached Hiroshima he had decided that foregrounding self-expression was inappropriate there; Ishiguro also provided a concrete methodological cue.^*20 Tsuchida himself has said that the atomic bombing was an event without precedent in human history and that, as a documentarian working in Japan, he could not accept simply turning away from it.^*25 His answer was not to search for faces more tragic or scars more severe than those photographed by earlier artists. He photographed hibakusha as they wished to appear in the present, returned to the same places, and photographed surviving objects one by one from the front with their histories attached. People, places, and objects were not forced into a single style; each received a different method of record.

Photographing Hibakusha

For Hiroshima 1945–1979, Tsuchida photographed 107 hibakusha without concentrating the tragedy of the bombing in their faces. In an Art21 interview, he explains that he accepted, as far as possible, the places and activities his subjects requested—at work, in a garden, dancing—and photographed them as people living in the present.^*25 When someone refused to be photographed, he did not force a portrait. In some cases he photographed the surrounding landscape or objects instead and reported the fact that permission had been refused.^*11 Tsuchida did not conceal the “person he could not photograph” as a missing number. The refusal itself entered the record, undermining the assumption that a photographer is entitled to photograph anyone he chooses.

Hiroshima Collection

In discussing Hiroshima Collection, Tsuchida states his premise plainly: “photography can only photograph the present.”^*21 In 1982, a camera could record the form a scorched dress or melted bottle had at that moment. The surface of the object could not reveal who held it on August 6, 1945, or what happened afterward. Tsuchida therefore gave equal weight within the work to the photograph of the surviving object and a written account of its owner’s experience.^*25 The viewer looks at the object, reads the text, then returns to the object. Tsuchida has also said that he felt a need to photograph these things “beautifully,” so that they would first attract attention as everyday objects instead of being staged solely as images of horror.^*25 He did not make the photograph reenact 1945. The photograph carries the object as it exists in the present; the text carries what that object passed through in 1945.

The text is not simply a transcription of the museum’s existing caption. Tsuchida reads donation interviews and archival material, then edits lengthy records into a form that can be read alongside the photograph, deciding what to retain, what to remove, and in what order.^*21 When the donor and date of donation are included, the reader can also see whether an object remained with a bereaved family for decades or when the owner eventually entrusted it to the museum. The photograph presents the surviving object in the present; the written account presents the event of 1945; the donation information records the time the object passed through before entering the museum.

Zokushin, 1968–75

In Zokushin, Tsuchida photographed festivals, banquets, and entertainment districts while preserving the gestures and expressions people directed toward the camera. He later recalled that being photographed made his subjects more expressive, and that those responses mattered to him.^*1 Ethnographic photography often minimizes the photographer’s presence in order to classify its subject from outside. Zokushin instead allows the act of photographing to alter what happens in front of the camera. The person holding the camera changes the other person’s gesture, and that change enters the photograph. This differs sharply from the later Hiroshima work, where Tsuchida tried to suppress his own stylistic habits as much as possible.

Counting Grains of Sand, 1975–89

Counting Grains of Sand gathers crowds from different cities and events into a single book, sequencing them from sparsely populated frames toward mass gatherings. The Smithsonian’s Tokyo, 1981, from Counting Grains of Sand is meant to be seen in relation to the other crowd photographs rather than isolated as a single “great moment.”^*5 The book ultimately arrives at the enormous crowd outside the Imperial Palace after Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989; individual faces that can still be followed near the beginning become increasingly difficult to distinguish by the end.^*2 In the later New Counting Grains of Sand, Tsuchida went further by digitally inserting himself—the person who had stood behind the camera—into photographs of crowds. He described the contradiction as a way to expose how readily viewers treat whatever appears in a photograph as “a fact that was there at the scene.”^*7

Hiroshima and Monument

Within the Hiroshima Trilogy, the people-centered Hiroshima 1945–1979 was extended in 2005 when Tsuchida revisited hibakusha he had photographed in the 1970s, making new portraits of the same people roughly thirty years later. The Yokohama Museum of Art holds Declined, from Hiroshima 1945–1979/2005, which records a refusal to be photographed, as a work in the series.^*22 In Hiroshima Monument, he returned at intervals of roughly a decade to buildings, trees, and other sites that remained in the city, photographing the same places again. Aging appears in faces; buildings undergo preservation and repair; the city around them is rebuilt. People, structures, and the city do not change at the same rate even though all trace back to the same bombing. Tsuchida places earlier and later photographs together, allowing the difference between the two images to show the change.

Hiroshima Collection, 1982–

Hiroshima Collection began in 1982 with photographs of atomic-bomb materials in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and has grown over more than forty years to roughly four hundred objects.^*8 The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum holds a photograph of Dress^*16 and also publishes images of Fountain Pen^*17 and Melted Sake Bottles, all photographed frontally as individual everyday objects within the same series.^*18 The texts Tsuchida adds are not copied from the museum’s short labels. He reads donation interviews and supporting material, then edits them himself into a length that can be read together with the photograph. He has said that he spends about as much time on the writing as on the photography.^*21 When new objects enter the collection, he photographs them; when he learns more about an owner or the circumstances of a donation, he revises the text. Across more than four decades, choosing which part of the past to preserve in words has become part of the work alongside the act of photographing.

International Reassessment of Hiroshima

Tsuchida’s Hiroshima Trilogy does not photograph the instant of the atomic bombing or its immediate aftermath. It photographs people roughly thirty years after the bombing, places from 1979 onward, and surviving objects from 1982 onward. The 2014–15 international exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography organized war photography not by nation or conflict but by the interval between an event and the making of the photograph—minutes, years, decades—and placed Ken Domon, Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, and Tsuchida on the same temporal axis as Don McCullin, Susan Meiselas, Sophie Ristelhueber, Taryn Simon, and others.^*23 Tsuchida was thus positioned not as a photographer who witnessed 1945, but as one who photographed the people, places, and objects that remained decades later. His work entered the exhibition as photography of what survives long after war, not photography of the instant of war itself. An earlier milestone in this reassessment was the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s 2007–08 retrospective, which brought together Zokushin, Counting Grains of Sand, and the Hiroshima Trilogy, tracing both “self-expression” and “thorough documentation” across his work.^*3

From MoMA in 1974 to ICP in 1979

Yoshiaki Kai’s study of the reception of MoMA’s 1974 New Japanese Photography notes that Tsuchida and Masatoshi Naito were positioned within a group associated with regional folk customs and traditional religion.^*24 Zokushin grew from a question about high-speed economic growth homogenizing regional culture, yet abroad it could also be read as evidence of a “traditional Japan” that still survived. Five years later, in ICP’s Japan: A Self-Portrait, Tsuchida appeared through Children of Hiroshima: 33 Years Later, which combined photographs and interviews with hibakusha.^*9 The same photographer was presented at MoMA in 1974 as a photographer of Japanese festivals and folk culture and at ICP in 1979 as a photographer of hibakusha thirty-three years after the atomic bombing. The two exhibitions framed different versions of “Japan” through the same photographer.

A 1987 U.S. Review

Tsuchida’s restrained approach did not always persuade critics. Reviewing a 1987 U.S. exhibition titled Hiroshima, the Los Angeles Times argued that graphic film footage of atomic-bomb injuries shown in the gallery overwhelmed Tsuchida’s quiet photographs and split the exhibition’s message.^*14 The same review, however, singled out the frontal, precise photographs of objects from the museum and the written histories attached to them as among the exhibition’s strongest sections.^*14 The same refusal to dramatize suffering could appear weak beside moving images yet work forcefully when viewers spent time with one object and one person’s history. Both sides of that problem were already visible in U.S. criticism at the time.

The Difference from Miyako Ishiuchi

Getty exhibition materials note that Miyako Ishiuchi, who began photographing clothing and objects belonging to hibakusha after 2007, knew the earlier work of Shomei Tomatsu and Tsuchida and deliberately chose a different method.^*19 Shuichi Tsukada’s research contrasts the two approaches to time. He describes Tsuchida’s Hiroshima Collection as a method of resisting the erosion of memory by recording objects together with their histories as people and the city change, whereas in hiroshima, Ishiuchi photographs aging garments as objects that exist “now” and greatly reduces the amount of detailed information attached to them.^*6 Even when photographing objects from the same museum, Tsuchida preserves in writing “whose object it was and what happened in 1945.” Ishiuchi, by contrast, shows the discolored and damaged clothing itself as it exists in the present.

The Carnegie International

At the 58th Carnegie International in 2022, twenty-nine works from Hiroshima Collection were shown, the largest presentation of the series in a U.S. museum to that point. A research bulletin from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum records that the series played an important role in the exhibition and was repeatedly identified as a highlight in press reviews.^*20 With twenty-nine photographs and accompanying texts shown together, international audiences encountered the project through the accumulated quantity of images and records made by the same method, not through a single representative photograph.