Page One
Photos from the world’s largest daily paper on display
A sumo wrestler, a ground splitting earthquake, the Beatles, and the funeral of an emperor share the halls of history at the UC Berkeley Center for Photography’s current exhibit, “50 Years of Photography in Japan 1951-2001.”
Japan’s The Yomiuri Shimbun is the world’s largest daily morning newspaper with a circulation of nearly 10,300,000 and the source of the five decades of photojournalism on display.
The idea for the exhibit came from Masahiko Sasajima, reporter for The Yomiuri Shimbun, while he was a visiting fellow at U. C. Berkeley last spring. Sasajima said his paper would love to do a news photo exhibit at the School of Journalism.
“We thought it was a fab idea,” said Ken Light, curator of the Photojournalism Center at the school. “It was a challenge for them and us.”
Culling through 50 years of newspaper photos sent from The Yomiuri Shimbun took Light and Carolyn Wakeman, head of the Asian reporting center, several days to make their selection.
With the history of a country in photographs that reflect a half-century of daily life, culture, politics, and natural disasters, the predominant number of photos was sports and local events. This helped narrow the selection to those few that were major historical events or kitsch culture, according to Light.
After choosing the images, some of which date back to the 1940’s, Light requested the negatives from The Yomiuri Shimbun. They found all of the negatives in their archives, made the prints and shipped them to the Center for Photography.
The variety of subject matter includes events that dramatically mark each decade they represent. The photos are strikingly mounted along the wood paneled halls of the journalism department overlooking a quiet courtyard.
The 50 black and white, 16-by-20 inch photos are on display through Nov. 5.
The exhibit was co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Journalism, The Japan Society and The Yomiuri Simbun in co-operation with the U.S.-Japan Twenty-first Century Project to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco Peace Treaty.
