In this September 29, 2022, lecture, Maggie Mustard, PhD, presented a history of postwar Japanese photography from 1945 to 1980, focusing on the major themes and practitioners at the heart of the media’s development following the end of the Second World War. Dr. Mustard introduced the central questions that photographers were asking in the immediate postwar moment—what does “realism” mean for a photograph? Should a photographer strive to be objective or subjective in their work? What social or political purpose can photography serve?—and discuss the subsequent radical experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s, amidst Japan’s rapid economic transformation and social unrest. This talk focused primarily on three photographers from each postwar decade—Domon Ken, Kawada Kikuji and Nakahira Takuma—but also discussed the work of Tōmatsu Shōmei, Ishiuchi Miyako, Narahara Ikkō, Hosoe Eikoh, Naitō Masatoshi and Moriyama Daidō, among others, who may be more familiar to American audiences.
Maggie Mustard is an art historian, museum educator, and curator. She earned her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, where her dissertation focused on questions of memory, trauma and representation in the work of Japanese postwar photographer Kawada Kikuji. As the Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow at the New Museum, she designed and organized exhibition-related public programming, and created a digital publication series activating the museum’s institutional archive. She was Chief Curatorial Advisor for the exhibition “The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki” (Museum of Sex, NY, February 8, 2018–September 3, 2018), and her work on issues of gender, power and curatorial ethics in Araki’s photography will be included in an upcoming edited volume on Heisei-era photography. She has recently been appointed Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University’s Art and Art History Department beginning in the fall of 2022.