The Journey into 1920s German Expressionism
Kazuo Kitai has been a photographer working in a primarily documentary style since the mid-60s, and is primarily known for his two books Sanrizuka and To the Village.
However, in 1980 he traveled to Germany and photographed German expressionist architecture over a four-month period -- a quite radical departure from the grainy, raw black and white photography he had done before. His German expressionist work was serialized in a monthly photography magazine in Japan, but the series was abandoned by the publishers mid-way through. The present work, published in 2008, handsomely brings this work to a much-deserved wider audience.
As Susumu Terada writes in the book's introduction (available in Japanese and English, as is Kitai's afterword):
...by viewing the photos in this book, we are able to understand how the photographer had developed his work from documentary photography to artistic documentary photography. In the temporal sense, the photos in this book follow the ones found in Sanrizuka and Mura e. But the photos in this book can also be seen as the manifestation of the originality that the photographer inherently possessed.
- Book Size
- 198 x 262 mm
- Pages
- 72 pages, 35 illustrations
- Binding
- hardcover
- Publication Date
- July 2008
