Ryūichi Kaneko

In 2017 Kaneko published a collection of essays in Japanese titled Nihon wa Shashin-koku de Aru (Japan is a Country of Photobooks). In his afterword about Kaneko, Hitoshi Tsukiji, says that Kaneko had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese and international photographic history; photographic technologies and development techniques; and reproduction techniques. He collected over thirty thousand photography related material over his 50 years of research.

Another important part of the development of his career happened in 1988 when he became a research specialist for the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography which opened in 1995 (and later become the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum). He played a pivotal role in researching for the museum's first exhibition, which reexamined Japan’s modern photography, The Founding and Development of Modern Photography in Japan.

In the 1970s, Japanese photography experienced an independent gallery movement. There was a plethora of small independent galleries sprouting up in different corners of Tokyo. In 1976, Kaneko went to Photo Gallery Prism's first exhibition, Kineo Kuwabara's Tokyo Genshi. It was at Photo Gallery Prism that Kaneko began building relationship with various photographers and people involved in Japanese photography like Shinzo Shimao, Hitoshi Tsukiji, Miyabi Taniguchi, and Osamu Hiraki. Through this networking, he became to collaborate with Shōmei Tōmatsu on Shashin Koku ("Photo Nation") which recorded the various activities of these young photographers.

One example was Hokkaido 101. The project was started in 1969, marking the 101st anniversary of the annexation of Hokkaido in 1869 after the Meiji Restoration. Some scholars say that the internal colonialism of Ezo, the former name of the Hokkaido, that displaced native Ainu peoples and was the beginning of the colonial legacy of the Japanese Empire. This differs from the standard narrative that Hokkaido was a unpeopled frontier that the Japanese developed. The goal of Hokkaido 101 was to photograph and document the what remained of the history of Japan’s internal colonialism. Although the project was never finished, it was formative to Kaneko’s decision to pursue the path of a photography historian and critic. Another example was the Pollution Campaign project that the All Japan Students Photo Association organized in 1970. Kaneko helped to organize the project and photographed pollution across Japan. The photographs taken by the group were organized and published in a photobook, Kono Chijō ni Wareware no Kuni wa Nai (“There is No Country for Us on This Earth”).

In 1967, Kaneko entered Rissho University, where he joined the photography club, affiliated with the All Japan Students Photo Association. Told by one of his university seniors to attend a lecture that the organization was holding, Kaneko went to the lecture hall to find Tatsuo Fukushima, who had recently become the leader of the All Japan Students Photo Association. Though Fukushima’s lecture, Kaneko was exposed to works of western photographers like William Klein's Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels; Robert Frank's The Americans; and Richard Avedon's Nothing Personal; and also works of Japanese photographers like Shōmei Tōmatsu's Senryō (“Occupation"), Uchi ("Home"), and 11:02 Nagasaki, Eikoh Hosoe's Otoko to Onna (“Man and Woman”) and Bara Kei: Ordeal by Roses; and Ikkō Narahara's Human Land: Ningen no Tochi.

The photobooks that Kaneko was exposed to while participating in the All Japan Students Photo Association inspired him to collect more. The first one he bought was Eikoh Hosoe's Otoko to Onna (“Man and Woman”) and the first foreign one was William Klein's Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels. He said that he wanted to buy more but he could not afford them, particular the foreign ones, because he was a student at the time. That is why he turned his attention to amateur photo magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. After publication of the comprehensive Nihon Shashin Shi, 1840-1945 (“A History of Japanese Photography 1840-1945”), Kaneko realized how vast the history of Japanese photography was and decided to learn about pre-war photography magazines as well. He scoured the used book districts of Kanda, Tokyo to collect these photographic records.

Ryūichi Kaneko (金子 隆一, Kaneko Ryūichi, May 18, 1948 – June 30, 2021) was a photography historian and critic, photobook collector, and curator. He also worked as a monk at the Shōgyōin (正行院) temple in the Taitō district of Tokyo while he researched the history of Japanese photography.

Kaneko wrote extensively about pre-WWII and post-WWII photography in Japan. In his essay Realism and Propaganda, he said the convergence of modern Japanese photography and high-volume printing reproduction and distribution happened around the 1930s, and as a result photography was generally used as propaganda. But while photography was used for political purposes, there were also more realist expressions that developed on the fringes of society. Kaneko made it his life's work to study these amateur photography magazines and exhibitions. He says that these pre-war modern photographic expressions “gave birth to and demonstrated the potential of the photographic explorations that would take place when the war came to an end and a new era began.” His research chronicles the realism that modern Japanese photographers utilized inside and outside of the political propaganda of the time.