Hoshino Michio (1952–1996) moved to Alaska in 1978, and over the course of nearly 20 years, conducted and documented numerous Arctic expeditions. Hoshino’s work, in which he breathtakingly captured myriad aspects of the magnificent natural landscape on film while further exploring it in writing, continues to touch the hearts of viewers, inquiring into the evolving relationship between nature and civilization, and provoking thought on the nature of contemporary life.
This exhibition presents the world of Hoshino as expressed in photographs and words, organized around multiple themes including “Masterpieces,” documenting nature in its pure state; “Correlations of Life,” which convey how life survives, generation after generation, in a harsh environment; and the “Mythical Realm,” which portrays the spirituality of people living in the far North. Also on view are materials such as the cameras and kayaks Hoshino used while shooting photographs in the wild, and rarely seen documentary video footage and handwritten manuscripts, immersing viewers in the world of the far North that Hoshino was devoted to portraying.

Izu Photo Museum is delighted to stage Forever (and again), an exhibition of works primarily from our permanent collection. From day to day we encounter many different people, and from time to time, we are parted from them by death. The relentless flow of time, heedless of the lives and deaths of individuals, cannot be resisted, and in its face, we may feel powerless. Yet even when one life comes to an end, memories etched deep in the heart are passed on by those left behind, living on with new meaning. Capturing a moment in the ongoing flow of time, photographs reflect the accumulated past and reawaken in the viewer stories in the form of memories. Works by five contemporary artists—Shizuka Yokomizo, Rika Noguchi, Rinko Kawauchi, Yurie Nagashima, and Terri Weifenbach—will offer opportunities to ponder the links between time and memory, and the nature of permanence.

Sawada Kyoichi was born in the northern Japanese city of Aomori in 1936. He worked at the US military base in Misawa before heading to Indochina in 1965, with the war was ablaze. Through the years of steady escalation of the Vietnam War, Sawada photographed on the front lines until he was shot to death in 1970 at age 34. In those 5 years in the war zone, he produced numerous masterpieces and won international recognition. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a group of photographs that included Flee to Safety, which captured Vietnamese people driven from their homes, struggling desperately to survive. The image confronted the world with the cruel reality of the battle zone.
This exhibition presents about 300 items, including previously unreleased photographs and original wire photos Sawada sent back from the battle. The photographs evoke both his homeland and the battle zones, crisscrossed by life and death. They allow us to examine the face of the Vietnam War that Sawada unflinchingly sought to convey. We hope it will offer an opportunity to contemplate the “American War.”

Organized by Izu Photo Museum
In collaboration with the Aomori Museum of Art

Sawada Kyoichi 16km south of Da Nang (c) Sawada Sata

Izu Photo Museum is honored to host the first solo exhibition at any art museum, anywhere in the world, of work by American photographer Terri Weifenbach (b. 1957).
Weifenbach embarked on her photography practice in the 1970s after studying painting at the University of Maryland and has since published 15 well-received photo books.
“The May Sun” will center on The Politics of Flowers, one of Weifenbach’s leading projects, released in book form in 2005, and The May Sun series produced during Weifenbach’s long-term residency at Izu Photo Museum in 2015.
The exhibition will comprise around 110 works, a number The May Sun series and a video work shot at the Kakita River springs (Shimizu-cho, Shizuoka), being presented publicly for the first time.

It is with great pleasure that the Izu Photo Museum presents the first-ever solo exhibition by Jochen Lempert to be held at a Japanese museum.
Following more than a decade of biological research, the Hamburg-based photographer has produced a body of black-and-white photographs focusing on myriad living things – animals, plants, insects, human beings – and natural phenomena. Lempert’s works, printed from film by the artist himself and notable for their analogue quality, not only function as detailed records bolstered by scientific knowledge, but are suffused with a great affection for all forms of life.
Featuring some of Lempert’s most important and latest endeavors, this exhibition introduces over 100 works since the 1990s in his unique style of installation. We invite you to experience the new worldview that Lempert creates and inspires.

From Symmetrie und Körperbau, 2005
© Jochen Lempert. Courtesy BQ, Berlin and ProjecteSD, Barcelona

Izu Photo Museum is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Fiona Tan, an internationally renowned artist working primarily with photography and video. This exhibition focuses on her new project Ascent, which takes Mt. Fuji as its starting point.
Fiona Tan is best known for her skillfully crafted and intensely moving installations, in which explorations of identity, memory and history are key. Tan’s artworks deal with the question of the gaze – both the way in which we look at images and, through them, at the world that surrounds us, and also the way in which images, like mirrors, sometimes seem to look back at us. Centered on the new audiovisual and photographic installation Ascent, her new solo exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum includes several new works shown for the first time.
Ascent (2016), Fiona Tan, still
Photo: Higuchi Masaharu

Documentarian Motohashi Seiichi (1940–) has used the two modes of photography and film to document the lives of ordinary people since the 1960s. His fields of observation have included coalmines, popular entertainment, the circus, a slaughterhouse, a train station. He has published three books and directed two documentaries that focus on people who continued to live in the vicinity of the Chernobyl power plant even after the nuclear accident. 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, and Motohashi’s photographs of an irradiated homeland have taken on a new urgency for us, in the wake of Japan’s nuclear meltdowns after the March 11 tsunami. The exhibition will trace the half-century journey of a photographer, featuring more than 200 of Motohashi’s images. The selection will include previously unreleased early photographs from his points of origin, along with a range of his representative work.
Chechersk, Republic of Belarus　1992

Marking the 70th anniversary in 2015 of the end of World War II, Izu Photo Museum will host a special exhibition focusing on photojournalism during the war and early postwar. Organized in cooperation with the Japan Camera Industry Institute, the exhibition features Yonosuke Natori, Ihei Kimura, Ken Domon, Yosuke Yamahata, Tsuguichi Koyanagi, and Shunkichi Kikuchi, whose work provides a prism on Japan from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Organized by Izu Photo Museum and the Japan Camera Industry Institute

Curation: Izu Photo Museum, Helmut Völter
In cooperation with Gotemba City Board of Education, Fujisan Juku no Mori

Mt. Fuji, with its beautifully symmetrical ridge lines, has been an enthralling subject since the invention of the photographic process. In the course of being photographed, and those images used extensively, an almost infinite number of times, a certain form became paradigmatic. This exhibition consists of two parts: Part 1 explores the genealogy of images of Fuji, and Part 2 introduces the work of the physicist Abe Masanao (1891-1966), who is known as the “Professor of Clouds.” Abe, who was born into an aristocratic family, invested his own funds to establish the Abe Cloud and Air Current Research Laboratory, in Gotemba, Shizuoka, in 1927. From this fixed point he carried out over fifteen years of observation of the clouds over Mt. Fuji. Abe was as much a scientist as he was an inventor—not only did he effectively combine two—and three-dimensional cinematography and photography in a very innovative and unique way, he also constructed parts of his photographic and measurement equipment by himself. This exhibition will present images in which he captured the ever-changing forms of the clouds above Fuji using time-lapse photography and other valuable materials, in the second of the Izu Photo Museum’s series of exhibitions of photographs of Mt. Fuji.

An exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of Ichiro Kojima’s death. Kojima was discovered by Yonosuke Natori and made a sparking debut in the 1950s; his work gained renewed attention in Japan and abroad after a 2009 retrospective at the Aomori Museum of Art. The exhibition will feature Kojima’s original prints and calling card-sized prints (dubbed “playing cards”), recreate the solo exhibitions Tsugaru that Natori helped organize and Freezing, and exhibit previously unseen photographs of Tokyo.

Masuyama was born and raised in the village of Tokuyama, in Gifu Prefecture. After losing her husband during the war, she farmed in the village while running a minshuku (guest-house). In 1957, a plan emerged to build a dam in this quiet village and Tokuyama—which Masuyama described as “a heaven, where everyone lived in laughter”—split between promoters of the dam project and skeptics. Masuyama picked up a camera for the first time in her life in 1977, when the Tokuyama dam project began to take on momentum. She had just turned 60.

One of the things that photography made possible was the viewing once again of events that have passed. This special character of photography is so self-evident that we are rarely conscious of it, but it plays a key role for a variety of photographers and their work.
This exhibition will feature photographs ranging from the anonymous photographers and craftsmen of over a century ago, to the work of contemporary artists such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Taiji Matsue, Yuki Kimura, and Noguchi Rika. It will explore the theme of “re-encounters” through photography in a variety of dimensions.