The Senichi Kimura Collection

Publication 2012

Cahier 3
Edited by Annette & Rudolf Kicken, Françoise and Alain Paviot
Published by Galerie Kicken Berlin and Galerie Françoise Paviot, Berlin 2012
Essays by Carolin Förster and Alain Paviot
48 pages with 30 illustrations

 

The collection of Japanese photography critic Senichi Kimura presented here consists of twenty-two pieces, among them important works by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and Margaret Bourke-White. Senichi Kimura (1900-1938) was among Japan’s most important photography critics and disseminators of the medium around 1930. He contributed significantly to spreading Neues Sehen (New Vision) in his country at a time when it was opening up to Western cultures and showing a productive inclination toward the principles of Western art, photography, and architecture. In 1924 Kimura became editor-in-chief of a new magazine, Photo Times, a publication initially based in the advertising department of the legendary Oriental Photo Industrial Company (Oriental Shashin Kogyo). Like other new photography magazines of the 1920s, for example Asahi Camera, Photo Times was devoted to a new, modern kind of photography, called Shinkô Shashin, which was influenced by German New Objectivity and the Bauhaus. The magazine, though originally geared toward a commercial client base, soon became an organ favoring western-oriented Modernism. Among its foundational principles, voiced in numerous articles, was the call for a new photography grounded in the medium’s inherent, technical characteristics.