Masashi Asada

Why Photography

Asada was born in Mie Prefecture and became familiar with photography after his father gave him a camera when he was in junior high school. He later enrolled at the Japan Institute of Photography and Film. After graduating, he returned to Mie for a period without a fixed career path, and later recalled that when he asked himself what he genuinely enjoyed, photography was the only answer that came to mind.^*1 He subsequently worked at a photography studio in Tokyo while saving up days off to return to Mie and make the pictures that would become Asada Family.^*2 Speaking about Daido Moriyama, Asada has said that he admired not only the photographs but the way of life built around walking the streets, shooting, developing, and printing.^*3

Family photography was already part of his home life. His father photographed family events and birthdays from the time Asada and his brother were young, and continued making an annual family photograph for New Year’s cards after they had grown up.^*4 Asada later observed that even one picture a year preserves changes across ten or twenty years, describing family photography as a repeated habit through which time accumulates rather than as a one-time record.^*4

Why Family

The direct starting point for Asada’s work was a school assignment to express himself in a single photograph and enlarge it. While deciding what to photograph, he asked himself what he would choose if he could make only one photograph in his lifetime, and selected his family. He also wanted to appear in the image rather than remain outside it as the photographer. At the hospital where his mother worked, the four family members reenacted memories of injuries suffered in succession by his father, brother, and Asada himself.^*2 Using the self-timer allowed him to join the frame, and the day spent reenacting a past event became a new family photograph in its own right.

Once the family had exhausted actual memories to reenact, Asada shifted his thinking from the past to the future and began inventing roles the family might have occupied: firefighters, band members, ramen-shop workers, and others.^*1 He has described the time spent developing the idea, finding a location, preparing costumes, and finally making the photograph as part of what the picture enables him to remember later.^*5 Staging became a way to create new experiences shared by the family, not simply a device for fabricating fictional scenes.

Family Photography and Staging Before Asada

In later interviews, Asada has cited the transformations and self-staging of Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, and Tomoko Sawada, as well as family-centered photography by Masahisa Fukase and Yurie Nagashima, as precedents he knew.^*2 Family and costume were therefore established subjects before his work. In Asada’s photographs, however, the entire family shares the setting, preparation, and performance. The event made for the photograph is collectively produced, unlike self-portraits in which a single artist plays multiple roles or photographs that observe a family’s private life.

In a 2009 review, Kotaro Iizawa compared the early Minna Kazoku series with Miwa Yanagi’s staged work. He described Asada’s constructed scenes as relatively loose extensions of everyday life and also detected a cynical note about contemporary images of the family beneath their lightness.^*6 The coexistence of the familiar format of the commemorative photograph and the artificiality of family members performing social roles has remained a recurring issue in later criticism.

Staging and Commemoration in Asada Family

Asada Family is staged, but Asada has explained that he does not resolve a scene in a single exposure. He makes multiple photographs over time, allowing his family to settle into their roles before choosing the final image.^*7 Expressions, mistakes, and timing change during the shoot, so the photograph contains both the predetermined role and the family’s actual responses as the event unfolds.

Asada has identified the duration of the shoot, and the ability to remember that time later through the photograph, as part of the work’s value.^*5 The finished picture presents a fictional scene, while the time the family spent gathering, preparing, and performing for it was a real event. Staging and commemoration therefore operate together: the act of staging itself produces a new occasion to remember.

Working Collaboratively with Families

In Minna Kazoku and Watashi no Kazoku, which extend the work beyond his own family, Asada uses family albums and older photographs as prompts, listening to which memories participants share before deciding what to photograph.^*7 Art Tower Mito’s participatory Watashi no Kazoku project likewise combined photographs with texts written by participants and described the shoot as a collaborative undertaking between Asada and those taking part.^*8 The memories and words of the people photographed enter the construction of the scene, making their contribution part of how the image acquires meaning.

Asada has said that photographs can become rigid when he proceeds only with his own ideas, and that accepting suggestions from people at the shoot can produce better results.^*4 He does not conceal the staging in order to simulate a “natural” family. What will be performed is decided with the participants. Their memories, wishes, and play enter directly into the making of the family photograph.

Photo Washing and Photographs That Remain

Immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Asada discussed with fellow photographers what photography could do. He did not believe that entering disaster areas simply to make new pictures would provide direct assistance while housing and food were scarce, so he first went as a volunteer. There he encountered efforts to wash photographs covered in tsunami mud and return them to their owners, an experience that led to The Power of Albums.^*9 Working to rescue existing photographs rather than produce new ones extended his concern with family photography into the period after an image has been made.

Akaaka published the expanded edition of The Power of Albums as a record, made with editor Satoshi Fujimoto, of photograph-rescue efforts in different communities.^*10 At Art Tower Mito, Asada noted that albums found among the debris were often set aside separately, suggesting that printed photographs could signal even to people other than their owners that they should not be thrown away.^*11 The value of the photograph is located not only in the quality of an image, but also in the process by which a physical record of someone’s time survives, is searched for, and returns to its owner.

Asada Family

The photobook Asada Family was published by Akaaka in 2008 and received the 34th Kimura Ihei Photography Award the following year.^*12 Across scenes in which the four family members appear as firefighters, a band, racing drivers, ramen-shop workers, and other roles, the recurrence of the same people holds the series together as family photography even as the costumes and settings change. The artist’s official works list places later projects, including NEW LIFE, within a long-term engagement with changes in his family.^*13

The 2021 exhibition Watashi no Kazoku brought together approximately 150 works, from his father’s annual New Year’s-card photographs and Asada’s graduation project to Asada Family, Minna Kazoku, The Power of Albums, and new work made at the exhibition site.^*14 This structure positioned Asada Family as a starting point within a longer trajectory that moves from domestic commemorative pictures to other families and to the preservation of photographs after disaster.

Minna Kazoku and Watashi no Kazoku

Minna Kazoku applied the method developed with Asada’s own family to other families. A 2009 review, when the series still consisted of roughly fifteen works, already identified it as the next development after Asada Family.^*6 In the later Watashi no Kazoku, the family is not defined only through a single group portrait; the work develops around relationships and narratives selected by the participants themselves.^*15

Art Tower Mito’s Somebody’s Best Album incorporated photographs and writings by members of the public, as well as workshops centered on photography, alongside Asada’s representative works.^*16 By placing the viewing of art and the discussion of one’s own family pictures in the same exhibition, the project refused to confine family photography to images authored by the exhibiting artist.

The Power of Albums

The Power of Albums follows people who cleaned photographs damaged by the tsunami after the Great East Japan Earthquake and worked to return them to their owners.^*10 A record of a talk at the University of Tsukuba notes that Asada repeatedly observed the cleaning and return of photographs in Noda, Iwate Prefecture.^*17 Here, family pictures made earlier by unnamed photographers become more central than photographs authored by Asada; questions of preservation and ownership come to the foreground.

Asada Photography Studio and Exhibitions

In Asada Photography Studio Mannen, Asada assumed the fictional role of a second-generation proprietor of a local portrait studio and reenacted studio commemorative photography with his family.^*18 By taking the family portrait studio—an established institution of commemorative photography—as his subject, the staging of Asada Family expands from domestic play to the professional question of who makes another person’s commemorative image.

Projects including Family Photo Tree, Canon’s Watashi no Kazoku, and KAAT’s YOKOHAMA PHOTOGRAPH continued this participatory approach with people recruited from local communities and organizations.^*19 At KAAT, portraits were produced collaboratively around the theme of “me/us now,” extending Asada’s commemorative photography beyond families defined only by blood relations.^*20

Asada Family and the Roles of Family

In a review of the exhibition Family and Photography, Megumi Takashima reads the family’s performances as firefighters, politicians, heroes, and other fixed roles as a reminder that the family itself can also be performed as a social fiction.^*21 The cosplay in Asada Family conveys the pleasure of familial play while exposing how roles such as “father,” “mother,” “older brother,” and “younger brother” are themselves shaped by social types.

Writing about the 2016 exhibition Hobo Kazoku., Kotaro Iizawa emphasized Asada’s commitment to commemorative photography and argued that the collaboration between photographer and models opened images that would normally matter only to their participants to third-party viewers.^*22 A critical awareness of the family as a role and the commemorative value of time actually spent together coexist within the same staged structure.

Family Photography and Self-Portraiture

Photographing the family from within has many precedents in Japanese photographic history, including work by Masahisa Fukase and Yurie Nagashima, and Asada has acknowledged his awareness of such artists.^*2 His emphasis falls on creating a new event for the photograph instead of exposing or closely observing private family life. Compared with the transformations of Sherman, Morimura, and Sawada, his work also shifts attention from a single artist performing multiple identities to several people sharing one scenario and producing “family” as a group within the frame.

Early Reception and Later Development

After Asada Family received the Kimura Ihei Photography Award, some criticism questioned whether its strong premise could sustain more than one project. In a 2016 review, Iizawa explicitly recalled his early concern that Asada might prove to be a one-hit phenomenon, then noted how the work had developed through NEW LIFE, Sotsugyo Shashin no Shukudai, The Power of Albums, and other projects.^*22 In his 2009 review, Iizawa had likewise looked to Minna Kazoku, rather than repetition of Asada Family, as the direction in which the work could continue.^*6

In the later work, critical attention shifts away from cosplay as a visual device toward Asada’s ability to apply commemorative photography to other families, local communities, portrait studios, and albums after disaster. The work expanded from repeating the formal premise of Asada Family to asking who participates in making a photograph and what happens to the resulting picture afterward.

Place in Photographic History

Asada’s contribution to family photography does not depend on a new subject or specialized photographic technology. In Asada Family, the day the family gathered, devised roles, and performed for the camera became the commemoration itself. Minna Kazoku and Watashi no Kazoku extended that method toward the memories of other people and collaborative production. The Power of Albums followed photographs years after they had been made, as they were cleaned and returned to their owners. Across these projects, he has treated family photography as something that encompasses the time spent making an image, owning it, and looking back at it.

Art Tower Mito’s Somebody’s Best Album brought Asada’s major series together with texts by participants in Watashi no Kazoku and post-disaster efforts to return photographs.^*16 The exhibition placed artist-made works, commemorative pictures kept in homes, and the later life of physical prints within one continuum. Asada’s work has therefore addressed not only whom a photograph depicts and how it is made, but also whose object it becomes and how it remains in the world.