WATANABE, Katsumi

About Japanese photographer, Katsumi WATANABE (1941-2006)

Born in Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, Katsumi WATANABE was an itinerant portrait photographer working primarily in Shinjuku in Tokyo. After graduating from high school, he moved to Tokyo and worked at the Tojo Photo Studio, where he learned studio photography. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, he photographed bar hostesses, drag queens, and gangsters in Shinjuku as a 'drifting portrait photographer'. As a drifting photographer, a very unique profession even at the time, he would walk around Shinjuku daily with a camera in hand and wait for someone to ask him to shoot a portrait. He would go home, process and print, and return the next day with prints for his customers. His subjects strike various poses to present themselves and their lives in Shinjuku with confidence. In the 1970s, when inexpensive automatic cameras began to spread, it became difficult for him to make his living as a drifting photographer. However, he continued to produce a massive archive of images of Shinjuku and its inhabitants. In addition to portraits, he shot children playing in back alleys, a riot in front of Koma Gekijo, and the piles of empty cans accumulating on Shinjuku’s street corners. As one of its inhabitants, he provided an insider’s view of the transformation of Shinjuku. In 1974, his work was included in the 'Fifteen Photographers Today' exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art and began receiving great acclaim. He then became a freelance photographer and shot all over the world, but continued to shoot Shinjuku all the while.

Photo books by as well as with works by Katsumi WATANABE

• 'Shinjuku gunto den 66/73 / Shinjuku Thievery Story '66-'73' (1973); 'The Gangs of Shinjuku' (1973, 2009); 'Hot Dog Shinjuku 1999-2000' (2001); 'Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s' (by Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Varanian); 'Story of the Shinjuku Thieves' (2013);