Katachi/ Form

We are pleased to announce the exhibition Katachi/ Form by IWAMIYA Takeji, opening on Saturday, September 20.

Iwamiya Takeji (1920–1989), born in Tottori Prefecture and active in Osaka, joined the Tanpei Photography Club around the age of twenty. Soon after joining, he won the grand prize in a club exhibition. However, he was dispatched to Manchuria during the war, and after returning to Japan he opened a photo-processing shop in Sannomiya, Kobe.

In 1951, while participating in the Democrat Artists Association, founded by Ei-Q and others, he also began photographing Katachi/ Form and Kyoto. Following a period of treatment for tuberculosis, he established Iwamiya Photos in 1955. As his career as a commercial photographer advanced, he continued working on the Katachi/ Form series, which took eight years to complete. What began as an exploration of the “roots” of ancient architecture gradually shifted to the forms found in architecture, then to those of traditional performing arts, and finally to everyday objects.

Yoshio Hayakawa, who designed the photobook, contributed the following words to the second volume: “How countless are the forms that surround our daily lives.” In an interview with the Osaka Shimbun, Iwamiya himself stated: “I want to confirm, through photography, something like the roots of Japanese culture. I feel as if I cannot close my eyes without doing so.”

In 1963, Katachi/ Form received the Photographic Society of Japan’s Annual Award. We hope you will take this opportunity to view one of Iwamiya’s most important early works.