Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography Since 1945

While major exhibitions of Japanese photography have become steadily more frequent over the last thirty years, Ravens & Red Lipstick offers one of the first overviews of the subject to be published in English.

Visually bold and richly detailed, this volume traces the development of Japanese photography from the severity of post-war Realism to the diversity and technical ingenuity of photography in contemporary Japan, via movements and groups such as Vivo in the 1960s and ‘girls’ photography’ in the 1990s. Interleaved are new interviews with some of the most influential practitioners in photographic history, from Moriyama Daido to Araki Nobuyoshi and Kawauchi Rinko.

Lena Fritsch writes with imagination and clarity, interrogating a cross-section of photographic movements and works against the vivid, shifting backdrop of Japanese social, cultural and political history. The result is both an accessible introduction and an illuminating work of analysis, for general readers and aficionados alike.

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'An expansive, informative book'
Tatler

'Lena Fritsch's vivid commentary and nuanced scholarship contextualise the influential characters, important works and entangled political movements of a fascinating history'
Aesthetica

Contents List

Introduction • 1. Post-War Trauma and Realism • 2. The Image Generation and Vivo: A New Hunger for Creation and Expression • 3. New Freedom: Provoke and the 1970s 4. Girl Power Photography • 5. Contemporary Japanese Photography • Chronology

About the Author

Lena Fritsch is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century Japanese art and photography, and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford). Her publications include The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s and an English-language edition of Moriyama Daido’s Tales of Tono.