Hiroji Kubota Photographer - (Hardcover)

About the Book

Catalog of an exhibition held at Aperture Gallery, New York and Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, November 2015 to January 2016.

Book Synopsis

Over the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota has spent his life traveling extensively and documenting the world around him. From his coverage of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s to his incomparable access to North Korea, Kubota has prolifically captured the histories of diverse cultures throughout the world. This sumptuous visual biography encompasses the best images of his life's work, broken down into chapters, with illuminating narrative texts throughout. Rooted in his experience of a Japan ravaged by destruction and famine at the end of World War II, Kubota's work is characterized by a desire to find beauty and honor in human experience. Hiroji Kubota Photographer includes all of Kubota's key bodies of work, including his many extended trips to China, Burma, the United States, and North and South Korea, as well as his home country, Japan.

From the Back Cover

Elliott Erwitt asks in his preface: Hiroji Kubota, exactly where have you been these past fifty years? After a few million miles of travel and photography, what do you make of our planet? This book provides the answer. Hiroji Kubota Photographer traces a compelling journey from his documentation of a turbulent America in the 1960s to his sweeping color panoramas of China, Korea, and Japan. In this sumptuous visual biography, the first survey of his work, Magnum's Tokyo-based photographer emerges as a brilliant chronicler of the world and of our times.

Review Quotes

Wherever Mr. Kubota worked he maintained a Japanese aesthetic sensibility--and a passion to create beauty that was his reaction to growing up in devastated postwar Japan. - The Wall Street Journal

The new Aperture monograph Hiroji Kubota Photographer is a stunning document. In more than 500 large, luscious pages, it provides a showcase for a pageant of images offering a concentrated examination of the camera's power to record and reveal, and of the vision of a skilled photographer who seemed, almost instinctively, to have been in the right place at the right time over and over and again. - Hyperallergic

...serves as a compelling starting point for exploring the themes, inquisitive spirit and technical innovations that characterized some of the most original documentary-photography artists of postwar Japan - Hyperallergic

It's the work of a photographer for whom making an excellent picture seems second nature. - Mother Jones

Kubota gives us a truly unique look at the transition of the world from the tumultuous '60s to the 2000s. - Mother Jones