SETTING SUN
Writings by Japanese Photographers

Japanese photographers have created a tradition strikingly different from that of their Western counterparts. Their work is based on ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture but often little known in the West. Many photographers throughout the history of the medium in Japan-including master postwar photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki-have produced substantial bodies of written work that form an essential counterpart to their visual art. Setting Sun is an anthology of key texts written from 1950s to present day by Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Araki, as well as by other leading Japanese photographers, including Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Eikoh Hosoe, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
The only anthology of its kind to appear in English, Setting Sun makes these texts available in translation to Western readers for the first time and provides a crucial context for photographers who have become increasingly well known and admired in the West. Each chapter in the anthology is devoted to a central idea or theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as watashi shosetsu (or the "I novel"), the bonds between man and woman, the role of nostalgia, and the shadows of a war lost and of a culture jettisoning its past. These writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image. This connection is so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without familiarity with these writings.

Setting Sun is edited by Akihiro Hatanaka, Yutaka Kanbayashi, and Ivan Vartanian. Mr. Hatanaka has worked as an editor on many major books of contemporary photography and photography history, including the complete writings of Araki (in twenty volumes). Mr. Kanbayashi has worked with many luminaries of the Japanese photo world as both an editor (most notably with Moriyama on Memories of a Dog and Tomatsu's 1951-60) and as an independent publisher. Mr. Vartanian is an editor and author based in Tokyo since 1997. He has written and edited several books on drawing, design, and photography.

SETTING SUN Writings by Japanese Photographers

SETTING SUN
Writings by Japanese Photographers