Kobo Abe as Photographer

Catalogue produced for exhibition at Wildenstein Tokyo in 1996.

Japanese novelist and playwright Kobo Abe (1924-1993) was a celebrated writer well before the international success and critical acclaim of his novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

Abe the photographer eschewed the same elements of image making that many Japanese photographers in the 1960s and ’70s also rejected, namely narrative, character, causal relationships, and exposition. His style harks back to the work of Kikuji Kawada, Daido Moriyama, and Takuma Nakahira, and to the gritty anonymity of everyday urban spaces turned into bizarro alternate worlds captured with a diffuse sense of subject.