Camera Mainichi

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Camera Mainichi カメラ毎日

June 1954 - April 1985
Monthly

Founding Publisher: Mainichi Shimbunsha ( Tokyo)
Founding Editor: Inoue Sōjirō

B5 size, approx. 18 x 26 cm

Camera Mainichi, with its newspaper publisher Mainichi Shimbunsha, can be regarded as a ‘newspaper-based camera magazine’ .
As Ivan Vartanian writes in his introduction in Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s-1980s* ; ‘mainstream photography magazines in the postwar era fell into either one of two categories: newspaper-based camera magazines (Camera Mainichi, Asahi Camera and Sankei Camera) and publishers specializing in camera magazines ( Camera, Nippon Camera, Photo Art )
With photo contests, news and reviews of camera equipment, Camera Mainichi was also aiming at the amateur photographers, just as its fellow camera magazines, but with its relative late introduction on the market, they tried to give the magazine a small twist.
At it’s launch, Robert Capa, a star in Japan thanks to his work in ‘Life’, was invited and do the promotional campaign, which lead to a long standing contract with the international photographic agency Magnum, featuring the work of their photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In that perspective, more than the camera-based magazines, Camera Mainichi leaned toward reportage and documentary photography.
In those early years, Camera Mainichi had also a co-publishing arrangement with the American magazine ‘Popular Photography’.

A big change came in 1963, when Kanazawa Yusuke became the editor-in-chief and made Yamagishi Shōji responsible for the gravure pages in the first section of the magazine and so created space for first-rate and unconventional photography, launching the carriers of a new generation of young photographers.
Yamagishi's unconventional approach made Camera Mainichi the leading magazine.

Yamagishi had joined the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun in 1950 as a cameraman, and then moved to Camera Mainichi as an editor in 1958. Kishi Tetsuo was the editor-in-chief and in charge for the main section, selecting the established photographers as Domon Ken, while Yamagishi Shōji did the editing of the not well known photographers.

After Yamagishi left in 1978, the magazine lost his innovative character. Sales declined and with Nishii Kazuo as the last editor, it ceased publication in April 1985

Along with Asahi Camera and Nippon Camera, Camera Mainichi became known as ‘the big three’.

* Japanese Photography Magazines, 1880s - 1980s
 by Kaneko Ryūichi, Toda Masako, Ivan Vartanian
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Goliga books 2022

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5 pages in gravure print; Nakamura Yoshinobu, Hidden Christians of Ikitsuki Island.

'An hour and a half away from Hirado in Nagasaki prefecture on a cruise ship, the isolated island of Ikitsuki island in the east china sea has been home to a group of ‘hidden christians’ who have been worshipping Santa Maria for 30 years escaping the oppression of the Tokukawa shogunate. As a photographer I was allowed to photograph pagans for the first time, but due to strict restrictions and guards, i was unable to take enough pictures, but i did my best to document.'

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5 pages in gravure print; Tomatsu Shōmei, Deserted park. ( Also translated as abandoned garden or ruinous garden).

Tomatsu, walking in Musashino, Tokyo, collected materials, insects, picked nuts, scraps etc and carefully composed and photographing them.

“It wasn’t something that was created from calculations, such as visualizing an image, but something that was created while I was doing it, and the moment when I was shocked and moved by the finished product, I clicked the shutter. It’s almost a spell, turning everything inside out “

To my knowledge this is the first publication in color by Tomatsu.
He used to work in black and white, but during a long stay in Okinawa, around 1970, he switched to color photography, and after that never returned to monochrome.
Also uncommon for Tomatsu here is the use of a large format camera.

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6 pages in gravure print; Nagano Shigeichi, A nuclear submarine is coming, (final episode of the serial)

Protest against the visit of a nuclear submarine to the U.S. Navy base in Sasebo.
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Fallen Angel (Shita Dashi Tenshi - 舌出し天使 )* appeared in the April 1965 issue of Camera Mainichi. A collaboration between Tatsuki Yoshihiro, a budding advertising photographer, and the poet Terayama Shūji, Fallen Angel marked an important turning point in both the history of Japan’s editorial design and photography.
(….)
Camera Mainichi, which had been a news-orientated publication, started to regularly feature the work of young advertisement photographers,
Editor Yamagishi Shōji was responsible for this shift, and with Fallen Angel he set a new standard for what was possible in a camera magazine.
This issue’s cover reads, “Appendix: Tatsuki Yoshihiro’s photobook Fallen Angel”. This special feature was tantamount to an entire photobook. Its scale in the magazine was unprecedented, encompassing fifty-six pages , with lay-out by Wada Makoto and commentary by Kusamori Shin’ichi.
(……)

This is just a small selection of the excellent essay about this issue by Toda Masako in Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s-1980s, Goliga Books 2022

* Note by Ivan Vartanian in his newsletter October 2020 about Tatsuki Yoshihiro:
舌出し天使 (translated to Fallen Angel) focused on a young woman being emotive and playful for the camera. In many instances, she short crop and somewhat androdyous build make her seem that much younger. The original Japanese title shita dashi tenshi translates literally to an ‘angel sticking out its tongue’ , which underscores better the youthful charge of the photography (as opposed to the more lyrical translation that was made at the time).
https://goliga.com/newsletter/tatsuki-selfie

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It is important to note that this work was not an excerpt from an exhibition or the digest of an extant photobook; rather, it was shot specifically for these spreads. ( Toda Masako in Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s-1980s )

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Eventually, in 1971, a selection of Fallen Angel, along with 2 other series, was published by Chuo Koronsha in ‘The Image Today Series’.

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5 pages in gravure print; Asai Shimpei, On a southern island.

In this issue again ( see Camera Mainichi April 1965, above ) the equivalent of a photobook published in a magazine; 32 pages in gravure print of Ogawa Takayuki’s story ’ New York Is ’

But from this months edition I choose the work of Asai Shimpei, who visited a small coral island, Okinourabujima, 50 kilometers north of Okinawa, which housed an American radar base.

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24 pages in gravure print; Tomatsu Shōmei; Hateruma Island, Okinawa.

Tomatsu’s first encounter with Okinawa was in 1969. This photo reportage appeared in the June and July 1969 issues of Asahi Camera, and was then published as a separate - and definitely his most political - book: ‘Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa.’
( see: Asahi Camera July 1969 )

Tomatsu: I first went to Okinawa in 1969. Like a pilgrim I had visited all the American bases from Hokkaido to Kyushu, and Okinawa represented the one remaining holy place.
There are so many bases concentrated in Okinawa that it was often said; “There aren’t bases in Okinawa, Okinawa is inside a bases.”

According to Tomatsu the character of postwar Japan could be summed up with the word ‘Americanization’.
He expected Okinawa, ( it had been under a U.S. military government since 1945, so more then a quarter of a century) to be even more ‘Americanized’ then Japan itself.

But he found a culture and a beauty which astonished him.

I wrote at the time that “I did not come to Okinawa but returned to Japan, and I will not be returning to Tokyo but going to America”.

The natural features of Okinawa are beautiful - the transparant blue sky, the sea so blue it looks as if it could dye your skin. The reflection of the sun pouring onto the coral reefs turns the sea a spectrum of colors: horizon blue, emerald, peacock green, cobalt. The sun burns, the wind shines…. In Okinawa, it seemed a natural step to switch to color photography….but even after returning to Tokyo, I did not go back to monochrome….I realized later that this was because of my fixation on America had weakened. America flashes into and out of view in black and white. In color, America’s presence is diminished.

His long stay in Okinawa permanently changed Tomatsu's photography. Not only did he switch from monochrome to color, but social or political issues no longer played a significant role in his work.

About the transformation in Tomatsu's work, John W Dower writes ;
(….)
Tomatsu quite literally discovered color, thereafter he shot less and less in black and white. He had found people, places, and subjects to treasure and celebrate.
To a certain degree, these intensely personal developments held a mirror to the times. Even before the ‘reversion’ of Okinawa could be assessed, before the fighting in Indochine actually ended, before the student demonstrators put away their banners, the counterculture had begun to melt away. The early 1970s were a watershed, not merely in Japan, but throughout the developed world. The sort of restless, unsettling vision Tomatsu exemplified throughout the 1950s and 1960s would become much rarer - everywhere - thereafter.
In Japan itself, iconoclasm did not disappear entirely, of course, and the debate about ‘being Japanese’ never ceased to be fiercely contested ground.

John W Dower, ‘Contested ground: Shōmei Tōmatsu and the search for identity in postwar Japan’. ( Shōmei Tōmatsu, Skin of the Nation, 2004 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art )

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Much more to enjoy in this months edition;

11 pages in gravure print; Fukase Masahisa, A Play 6

(….)
These works were published in eight successive parts over a period of three years in Camera Mainichi, under the title ‘A Play’.
In the first three parts, Fukase overlays multi-exposure images of the countryside and of the city with stage photographs taken during performances of Jōkyō Gekijo, an underground ‘situationist theater’ company run by Jurō Kara, and of Ankoku-butoh shadow dancing, a new form of expression set up by Hijikata Tatsumi. Fukase’s layering technique consisted of rewinding an already exposed film in order to take new photographs on top; this meant that; “I had no idea what I had photographed nor where until I developed them”.
By the fourth part of ‘A Play’, there was a radical shift in style.
Fukase abondoned photomontage in favor of shots taken directly within his surroundings, the Matsubara residential complex. The people featured in this series are his carp-fishing friends, as well as Ashikawa Yoko and Kobayashi Saga, dancers who worked under the supervision of Hijikata Tatsumi.
Fukase describes their presence within the banal suburban landscape as follows: “You end up no longer seeing a landscape as a result of having it in front of your eyes every day, so nudity becomes a necessary stimulant . This, therefor, is fictitious.”
(….)

Kosuga Tomo in ‘Masahisa Fukase’, Edition Xavier Barral 2018
Kosuga Tomo is director Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tokyo.
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3 pages in gravure print; Sawatari Hajime, Nadia 6

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Sawatari Hajime's first photo book was a special edition of Camera Mainichi, as a part of the Private series of ‘talent” books, published by Mainichi Shimbunsha.
Nadia was the third and final volume of the series.
It is a compilation of the "NADIA" series, which ran in Camera Mainichi from the November 1971 to November 1972 issues, and is made up of five parts: Forest Doll Museum, Wings of the Night, Travel in Italy, Inside the Mirror, and Winter. This is a place where fiction and reality intersect, made possible by his encounter with Nadia Galli, a model from northern Italy.

As the editor Shoji Yamagishi wrote at the end of this book, which was created using fashion photographic techniques, Nadia's various facial expressions and appearances, while the truth and the illusion are intermingled between the fiction and documentary gorges, are projected in various scenes.

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15 pages in gravure print; Fukase Masahisa, Karasu 2

Ravens 2 is the second publication of the rensai ‘Ravens’ by Fukase. Ravens 1 appeared in the October 1976 issue of Camera Mainichi. The serial was sporadically published between 1976 and 1982. ‘Ravens Final Chapter’, was published in the November 1982 issue of Camera Mainichi.

Depending on the episode, Fukase used both color and black-and-white photography. Ravens is a complex mosaic of formats and time, with reflections from the past, sometimes projected over current events.

Very interesting in this month’s episode is the accompanying, extensive text, in the form of a travavelogue or like a kind of diary. The first line is: “Why go up North”
These texts were not included in the famous book ‘Karasu’ ( English title ‘Ravens’), published by Sōkyūsha in 1986.
Karasu is commonly regarded as one of the highlights of Japanese photo books.

“ (….) it is the expression of the lonely mental image that he had while traveling in Hokkaido. Although separate and independent photographs are often brought together in a series, it may by difficult for people abroad to become accustomed to a photographic presentation , as in this case, where images are connected and shown in the manner of literature being read. In this case of coarse, the subject loses its inherent meaning and the images should be taken as reflecting the photographers emotion”.
From the introduction by Yamagishi Shōji.

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6 pages in gravure print; Fukase Masahisa, Karasu 4

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The farewell issue.

Editor’s Note.

This magazine was founded in 1954, launched as a monthly for amateur camera aficionados. It was to be centered around the three pillars of contests, in which buffs could vie with their skills, technical commentary as well as guidance on various camera mechanisms, and frontpieces by professional photographers as photographic examples. Having benefitted from the liberal quantity of commercial photography companying the period of high growth in Japan in the 1960s, this magazine then changed its direction during that decade from an emphasis on a contest centered composition toward frontpieces and mechanisms.
Camera Mainichi promptly introduced the new wave of contemporary photography in the latter half of the 1960s. It fostered young photographers by establishing a spot for them, and continued as a magazine pivoted around photography. Commercial photographers such as Tatsuki Yoshihiro, Shinoyama Kishin, and Yokosuka Noriaki as well as other artist like Moriyama Daido, Tsuchida Hiromi, Suda Issei, and Akiyama Ryoji fledged out from here. Moreover under the helm of Yamagishi Shoji, editor for nearly 20 years ( who died in 1979) we introduced the photographs of J.H. Lartigue, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, and so on in Japan.
Camera Mainichi has continued to respond sensitively to the new waves of photography, not only in Japan, but also on the international scale. We have proceeded with editing combining antennas that would take up Cindy Sherman and eyes which would focus on Roman Vishniac.
Nevertheless, despite all this, I must regretfully inform you readers that we are now closing the 31 year history of Camera Mainichi. The automatization of the camera has had some bearing on this. That did not expand the sales of the single-lens reflex camera, but rather seems to have put an end to it. Moreover, with automatization, the camera has become an electronic instrument. The age of silver bromide photographs must undergo a great period transition now that electronic photography has appeared.
Camera makers have started advancing into other fields such as computers and copy machines as a means of survival. Amidst such circumstances, a decrease in advertising pages becomes a large factor influencing the very existence of magazines like ours with high production costs ( in order to maintain a certain printing standard). We just barely managed to continue this magazine while a rationalization of staff was being carried out these past several years. However the fact that one camera maker went bankrupt last spring served to make the slightly tilting wall collapse.
This April issue will be our last.

Heinrich Zille (p.43-70) took photos to us as materials for his own paintings of Paris when Atget was shooting it and of Berlin, where W.Benjamin was spending his youth. We are running his photographs along with the works of the young Japanese photographer Kitajima Keizo ( p.116-134) who himself went to Berlin in 1983, and returning last year.
The fourth annual Domon Ken Prize is being awarded to Enari Tsuneo (p.87-103) for his document pursuing the young Japanese left behind in China during the confusion at the end of World War Two.

There exists in Japan a Buddhist idea of “dying nobly like the scattering blossoms”. Thus, Camera Mainichi has chosen to scatter along with Tomatsu Shomei’s photographs of cherry blossoms in Kyoto (p.168-179).
Thank you for your patronage over these years. Farewell.

By Nishii Kazuo
translated by Lora Sharnoff