Through “Young Eyes”: The Postwar Student Photography Movement and Photography as Anonymous Action

In 1952 the All Japan Student Photography Association (Zen nihon gakusei shashin renmei) was founded, uniting existing elementary through university photography clubs across Japan into one collective group. It was revolutionary in its approach to connecting professional photographers and critics such as Fukushima Tatsuo, Domon Ken, Kimura Ihee, Hamaya Hiroshi, and Tomatsu Shomei directly to students through photography courses and workshops and for its prolific publications. In the 1950s—60s the group developed a collective approach to making photo essays where members anonymously contributed images along a theme. The collective photo essays varied from a focus on local social landscapes, the passing of time in Hiroshima, to environmental degradation at the Ashio copper mines. In this paper I explore the historical significance of anonymous photographs in postwar Japan. How was the idea of anonymity and collective image making a means to place the image, rather than a photographer’s identity at the center of meaning making? How has their collective and anonymous approach to producing and publishing photographs meant that their work has been largely ignored by the scholarly community? In the final portion of this paper I analyze the photographs of the Ashio copper mine taken by the Jissen Women’s College in the early 1970s in relationship to the photography zine On This Earth We Have No Country (Kono tsuchi ni ha wareware no kuni ha nai) (1970). How did the students use the historical precedent that Tanaka Shozo set to ask, “What should we rise up against through photography?”