Masahisa Fukase

The Museum of Modern Art’s 1974 exhibition New Japanese Photography included 15 photographers including Eikoh Hosoe, Masahisa Fukase, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. This groundbreaking exhibition, co-curated by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, was organized as a series of one-person exhibitions devoted to each photographer, all of whom had vastly different approaches and concerns, from bucking traditional Japanese values to new attitudes to sex. A common thread was a grainy, high-contrast, atmospheric style that became a stylistic calling card for post-war Japanese photography.