Koyo Kageyama, Walking Together, August 1934.
This photograph, taken in August of 1934, depicts a fashionable young couple strolling along Watanabebashi Bridge in front of the Osaka Asahi Newspaper Building, one of the representative modernist buildings of the early Shōwa era. The work has become a defining image of the sophisticated urban lifestyle that permeated Japan’s major cities in the early 1930s. Mizusawa Tsutomu, director of the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, describes it as a “masterwork that anyone would include among Kageyama Kōyō’s representative [photographs] for it reaches a [high] level of accomplishment with the reserved juxtaposition of light and dark, the clear, pared-down composition, [an image] that it is not an exaggeration to describe as the essence of prewar modernism.” Professor Samuel C. Morse, 2015. (x)
Kageyama Kōyō (1907-1981) photographed people in Tokyo, Japan during the Shōwa imperial period (1926–1989). This tumultuous time in the country’s history spans 1923’s Great Kantō Earthquake, a depression, rapid militarization, near annihilation during World War II, and the challenges and triumphs generated by the prosperity of the post-war period. (x)