Signed, Tatsuo Kondo - Kohoku - 1977

Kohoku

Tatsuo Kondo
Japan Camera Co./1977/Japanese/220*310*20

Kohoku / Kohoku" is a collection of works by Japanese photographer Tatsuo Kondo, an amateur photographer born in Nagoya in 1916, who moved to Gifu upon his marriage and continued to take photographs while running a photographic materials store. He was a close friend of Hiroshi Hamaya, one of Japan's leading photographers, who described Kondo's photographs as follows. He likes to take pictures of yin rather than yang, dark rather than light, cloudy or rainy rather than sunny, and even people at festivals seem sad when he takes them. What is wrong with this? His photographs are very Japanese. The way he chooses his subjects, the way he interprets them, and the way his photographs are stretched are very Japanese. I see it as neither figurative nor figurative, but a Japanese mental image, and Kondo's photographs are nothing but the expression of a Japanese mental image. This book is composed of illustrations taken in the northern (eastern) part of Lake Biwa, and a number of works that are said to have been influenced to a large extent by Hamaya's masterpiece “Ura-nihon” (Japan Behind the Scenes). The book is also captivated by the profound black and white by Gravure Seikosha.