KITAJIMA, Keizo

About  Japanese photographer, Keizo KITAJIMA (b.1954, Suzaka, Nagano)

Keizo KITAJIMA is among Japan's leading photographers in the 1970s and 1980s, known for his grainy black-and-white images of people in Tokyo's streets, at the US-American military base in Okinawa, and in New York. Daido MORIYAMA praised his talent as a gifted snapshot artist. His 'Camp', which both set up in the busy Shinjuku district in 1976, was an experimental space for photographers before the gallery system was introduced. In his legendary experimental series 'Photo Express Tokyo' (1979), he photographed people in bars and on the streets of Shinjuku at night, right before the 'camp', converted the gallery into a darkroom to produce wall-sized prints as a public performance event, and even published the images as an instant booklet. Through these processes of instantaneous image delivery, he explored how time affects photography in terms of documentation, recording, and memory. His photographic work has been exhibited many times in Japan and internationally. His publications are popular with photo book collectors, and the significance of his work has been recognized by Japanese photography awards on several occasions.

Photo books by as well as with works by Keizo KITAJIMA (a selection)

• 'Photo Express Tokyo, No. 1 - No. 12' (1979, 2011); 'New York' (1982); '24 Pictures 1983-1988' (1988); 'The Joy of Portraits' (2009); 'USSR 1991' (2012); 'Camp 1979' (2015); 'Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s' (2009, by Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian'; 'In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11' (2016)