Norihiko Matsumoto

Photography and the Mass Media

Matsumoto first became interested in photography around his second year of junior high school. In a 2024 interview, he recalled borrowing a twin-lens Ricohflex for a week from a boy who had been evacuated to his area, and using it to photograph Onomichi, a shipyard, and a launching ceremony.^*21 In the same interview, he said that he read science magazines avidly, was curious about everyday topics, and was considering a career in “mass media.”^*21 Photography gradually came to him as a medium linked to that work: a way to go out toward unfamiliar subjects and communicate people and events to a broad public. He later entered the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art and began photographing stage artists from Japan and abroad while still a student.^*2 His own desire to “see and touch anything,” together with his interest in mass media, became a common starting point for activities that later ranged across theater, magazines, and research into photographic history. Art Platform Japan likewise lists Matsumoto as both a photographer and a writer on photography, reflecting the long coexistence of image-making and writing in his career.^*1

Fourteen Years with Fubuki Koshiji

Stage photography at Nissay Theatre had a clearly defined practical use. Matsumoto recalled preparing roughly 500 photographs from a single production for distribution to newspaper reporters, while also photographing rehearsals; stage photography functioned as part of the publicity and news infrastructure linking the theater to newspapers and magazines.^*21 He also said that although he had photographed Fubuki Koshiji earlier, his sustained work with her began at Nissay Theatre.^*21 The Kyushu Sangyo University Museum notes that Matsumoto photographed Koshiji both onstage and at home over fourteen years.^*2 In Fubuki Koshiji, Long Recital, lighting, costume, and gesture are tied to a specific performance, unlike a portrait reconstructed in the studio.^*5 The immediate purpose was press distribution, but following the same performer over years produced an accumulation of changing repertory, bodies, costumes, and stage direction. Ephemeral publicity use and the later value of the negatives as a comparative cultural record occupy the same body of work.

The Body on Stage

Yaeko Mizutani, Meiji Ichidai Onna is cataloged as a National Theatre performance of June 24, 1975.^*7 Tsukiyo Garasu is recorded as a November 7, 1974 performance at Shinbashi Enbujō.^*4 Matsumoto’s work at Nissay Theatre was closely tied to the practical task of photographing rehearsals and performances for distribution to newspapers and magazines.^*21 Under those conditions, the photograph had to preserve enough of the lighting, costume, posture, and relation to other performers to identify the role and production. A self-contained psychological portrait was not the primary task. Repeatedly photographing the same actor over long periods produced a sequence in which the body changes according to role and staging. The result differs structurally from a conventional portrait album of one person. The 1979 National Theatre catalogue devoted to Yaeko Mizutani shows one way in which photographs first made for theatrical publicity later became material for the history of performance.^*8

Venice and Color

Collection records show that Matsumoto’s work also includes urban color photographs such as Venice and Venice at Night. Tokyo Museum Collection catalogs Venice as a silver dye-bleach color print.^*9 In the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Venice at Night, artificial urban light, signage, and nighttime color organize the image differently from a theatrical spotlight.^*10 These works show that his photography extended beyond records of stage performers into observations of the city using color processes from the 1960s through the 1980s. What they share with the stage photographs is an attention to temporary scenes formed by people and architecture under artificial light; color becomes a means of registering differences among light sources and places.

The 1968 Survey of Japanese Photography

The 1968 exhibition surveying a century of photographic expression in Japan was a large-scale attempt by photographers themselves to investigate and select from the country’s photographic past. Matsumoto recalled that his writing experience led to his being assigned the chronology, which involved extensive reading and searching for photographs around the country.^*21 The committee, which included Shōmei Tōmatsu, gathered photographs and reproductions on the scale of hundreds of thousands and classified commercial photography, accidents, advertising, state propaganda, Manchuria, and wartime material alongside art photography, bringing the involvement of Japanese photographers in colonial rule and wartime propaganda into the exhibition’s historical field.^*12 Takuma Nakahira and Kōji Taki carried this research into the critique of established systems of representation that fed into Provoke.^*24 Matsumoto did not move toward Provoke’s visual language. His role was to collect past photographs as a professional photographer and participate in the decisions—through chronology and classification—about what would count as Japanese photographic history. The project marks an institutional shift in the late 1960s, when production and historical writing were being undertaken within the same community of photographers. In a 1968 roundtable held during preparations, Tōmatsu remarked that photographers themselves had previously done little with history, and described beginning with chronology-building and the study of prewar magazines.^*11 Recent scholarship has examined the exhibition as an effort in which photographers surveyed roughly 500,000 items, selected 1,640, and compiled a national history comparatively, a form of “photographers as historians” that also anticipated later thinking about the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.^*15 The exhibition catalogue and chronology are now held by the National Diet Library, making the exhibition itself a historical research object.^*14 The NDL record gives the exhibition dates as June 1–12, 1968, identifies the Japan Professional Photographers Society as organizer, and notes the appended chronology of Japanese photography.^*6

Preserving Photographic Originals

Matsumoto’s institutional work moved beyond surveys of museum holdings to the preservation of photographic originals themselves. Nihon no Bijutsukan to Shashin Korekushon is cataloged as a foundational survey of photography collecting in museums across Japan.^*13 The Japan Professional Photographers Society’s Photo Archive explicitly identifies the dispersal or disposal of film after a photographer’s death and image loss caused by deterioration in Japan’s hot, humid climate as reasons for its establishment.^*22 The same page includes Matsumoto’s own reports on film deterioration and the archive’s activities, as well as on securing a storage facility for photographic originals, confirming his direct involvement in both preservation science and collection logistics.^*22 The Photo Archive gathers and organizes negatives and film that would not survive through museum collecting of finished prints alone. Matsumoto worked on both the survey of museum collections and the preservation of originals, participating from within the professional photographic community in two related decisions: what should enter a museum as a work, and which source materials should survive as evidence for photographic history. Preservation here was an active part of determining the archive available to future historical research. In 2007, Matsumoto also took part in a hearing of the Copyright Subdivision of Japan’s Council for Cultural Affairs as a working professional representing the Japan Photographic Copyright Association and the Japan Professional Photographers Society.^*19 This shows a parallel involvement in the institutional questions of photographic use and rights. The JPS now lists him as an honorary member.^*18 A 2026 exhibition by the Japan Photographic Copyright Association likewise included his work, identifying him as a former executive director.^*20

Before Matsumoto: Stage Photography in Japan

Before Matsumoto, Japanese photography already had an important history of the stage as subject. Masao Horino photographed theater, dance, and actors around Tsukiji Shōgekijō in the 1920s, later connecting bodily performance to modernist photography and graphic montage in the 1930s.^*27 Ihei Kimura photographed kabuki alongside his advertising and snapshot work; in images such as Sixth-generation Onoe Kikugorō, Kagamijishi (1934), the small camera catches a fleeting expression or gesture within performance.^*26 Matsumoto’s difference lay in working inside the repetitive professional system of postwar theater publicity, photographing many productions while following the same actors and singers over years. The 1995 JCII Photo Salon catalogue on Nissay Theatre performances from 1964 to 1971 brings productions with Tatsuya Nakadai, Chieko Higashiyama, Mikijirō Hira, Kyōko Kishida, Haruko Sugimura, and others into a single sequence.^*28 Images distributed immediately to newspapers and magazines could later be compared across years as records of performers’ bodies, costumes, lighting, and stage direction. The inclusion of Matsumoto’s photographs of Fubuki Koshiji in the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s broad survey of postwar Shōwa photography also reflects this shift in use.^*16 The 2019 exhibition on world stage artists photographed from 1955 to 1986 similarly presented decades of stage portraits as a sequence extending across postwar international performance culture, beyond their original publicity function for separate productions.^*25 Nissay Theatre, which opened in 1963, continued to produce and present drama, musicals, and opera; Matsumoto’s work of the 1960s and 1970s developed alongside the establishment of this large-scale postwar theater culture.^*3

Roku no Kai and VIVO

Matsumoto formed Roku no Kai (Group of Six) with classmates from Nihon University College of Art—Tadashi Takamura, Keisuke Kumakiri, Tōru Nogami, Keiichi Kimura, and Kōichi Saitō—and the six continued exhibitions and small-format photobooks for decades while maintaining different professional specialties.^*23 In the late 1950s, Kazutaka Narahara, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Shōmei Tōmatsu, and others formed VIVO, a short-lived platform that pushed self-directed work and highly individualized visual languages beyond the demands of news and advertising.^*24 No direct line of influence between the two groups has been established, but their organizational models were markedly different. VIVO condensed strong individual authorship into an independent presentation platform over a short period; Roku no Kai brought together photographers working in theater, portraiture, reportage, architecture, and other fields, who sustained collective exhibitions alongside their professional careers for more than half a century. Matsumoto’s stage photography belongs to this second model. It shows how postwar photographers working outside avant-garde movements also used exhibitions and publishing to separate their own work from its immediate professional function and place it within critical circulation.

Matsumoto in Postwar Photography History

Matsumoto’s career repeatedly changes the institutional setting in which the same photographs operate. First, stage photographs made at Nissay Theatre were immediate professional images distributed to newspapers and magazines.^*21 Second, exhibitions, portfolios, and museum collections reorganized those photographs as works and historical records through which postwar stardom and stage direction could be studied.^*16 Third, Matsumoto himself participated in chronology-building for the 1968 exhibition, surveys of museum collections, and the preservation of photographic originals through the JPS Photo Archive, taking part in the selection of what would remain available as primary material for photographic history.^*22 Unlike a photographer whose historical position centers on a new formal language, Matsumoto linked production, editing, and preservation through the continuity of professional photographic work. His career therefore contains the process by which images made for short-term theatrical use later became sources for the histories of photography and performance. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum Library’s holding Norihiko Matsumoto photographs: portfolio III also shows stage photographs preserved as a portfolio selected and edited by the photographer, giving press images a second life as an authored group.^*17