IBASHO proudly presents the exhibition VIVO, a group show with work by the founders of the renowned Japanese photographer’s collective VIVO: Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, Akira Tanno and Shomei Tomatsu. Although VIVO was active only from 1959 until 1961, it culminated a movement in postwar Japanese photography called ‘the image school’ with roots dating back to the early 1950s and anticipated and profoundly influenced Japanese photographic style of the 1960s and 1970s. 

What distinguishes their work from that of the earlier generation of photographers is their obsession with how to describe immediate experience: their images are not comments on experience, but experience itself. The VIVO artists aimed to express, rather than merely document, the visual and existential discord that pervaded everyday life. They accomplished this through their clear concepts, a meticulous sense of composition and framing, coupled with a heavy emphasis on the symbolic.

Artists: Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, Akira Tanno, Shomei Tomatsu