Fraser, K. (2011). Photography and Japan. London: Reaktion Books.

This volume on Japan is one in a series of short texts exploring various aspects of Photography and ..., such as Literature, Science, Death, Anthropology and Cinema.  Among the country specific titles are Australia, Egypt, Ireland, Italy and USA.  The Japan volume contains no information on its author, Karen M Fraser, apart from her being an Assistant Professor in Dept of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University.  Her university page does not list publications and a search of her name at Google Scholar is empty.  An internet search reveals she is an American scholar with a BA, MA and PhD in Art History, the last at Stanford, and that she teaches a course on the very subject of her book, suggesting it may function as a class text.

At 170 pages and containing a generous 104 images, the actual text is quite short.  Given Fraser’s direct and unaffected writing style, the book is easily and quickly digestible. If you are reading with or near an internet connected device, however, you may find your reading experience greatly lengthened by searches for images from the many photographers introduced within its pages.

The book is essentially four essays.  The introduction functions as historical summary, while the following three chapters look at the intersection of photography and national identity, war, and the city.  Fraser wisely eschews any idea of a national aesthetic, preferring instead to investigate “the relationship between photographic imagery and [the country’s] dynamic social history.”  It seems that Japanese practice has not varied much in style or subject matter from photography as practiced in the rest of the world and one would be hard pressed to find any examples of photographers or photography that are uniquely Japanese.  The one possible exception of something truly different is the role and influence of the photography club, which Fraser discusses in relation to the avant garde, but of which there were many more prosaic iterations in the prewar period, as noted in Ross’ Photography for Everyone. Comparative studies with groups in other countries would seem to be necessary, however, to determine how uniquely Japanese these clubs and their influence might have been.

In the end, what emerges from the text is the idea that to appreciate Japanese photography, one must first have some appreciation for Japanese history and culture, that while the broad outlines of photographic history are much the same everywhere (as a result of similar economic and technical developments - photography could only exist, for example, in societies with the requisite industrial base and a class of practitioners capable of living off economic surplus, while technical limitations imposed a set of aesthetic effects), how photography was used at any particular time and place has much to do with local conditions.

An academic review of this text can be here.

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