The Naniwa Photography Club (浪華写真倶楽部) is an avant-garde amateur photography club that was established with the support of the Kuwata Photographic Materials company in 1904 in Osaka. It is the oldest amateur photography club in Japan. Key members were Kuwata Shozaburo, Ishii Yoshinosuke, Kometani Koro, Fukumori Hayuko, Yasui Nakaji, Yoho Tsuda, Hirai Terushichi, Kobayashi Meison, and Umesaka Ori. After establishment, the club began to exhibit their ''Nami-ten'' exhibition. This photography exhibition has been held almost every year since the club was established with several exceptions of the years during World War II. The clubs second exhibition was held in 1908 and kicked off major organized activities by the club. The central photographers in this exhibition were Kometani Koro, Yokoyama Kinkei and Kajiwara Keibun. These photographers used pigment printing process in their gum-bichromate prints. During the Taisho Era, the group's works were centered around

Pictorialism Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer ha ...

. Yasui Nakaji became a member of the Naniwa Photography Club in the second half of the Taisho Era. He used the Bromoil Process to create his Pictorialist photographs. Nakaji would later establish the

Tampei Photography Club The was a group based in Osaka from 1930 until 1941 that promoted avant-garde and, toward the end, socially concerned photography. The group was founded around the photographer Bizan Ueda, among photographers who bought their supplies from the T ...

in 1930. The character of the works exhibited by the Naniwa Photography Club changed drastically in the 21st ''Nami-ten'' exhibition in 1932 when the works of

Koishi Kiyoshi (March 26, 1908 - July 7, 1957) was one of the most prominent Japanese photographers in the first half of the 20th century. He was born in Osaka and became a member of the Naniwa Photography Club in 1928. In 1933 he published the monograph ''Sh ...

were exhibited. Koishi's series ''Early Summer Nerves'' utilized special techniques such as

photogram A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The usual result is a negative shadow image th ...

and

photomontage Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image ...

. This was the moment that the Naniwa Photography Club became one of the central clubs of the Japanese '' Shinko-Shashin'' (New Photography) Movement. They embarked on a more

Surrealist Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

approach to avant-garde photography in Japan. Together with the Tampei Photography Club and the Ashiya Camera Club, the Naniwa Photography Club became the cultural powerhouses of the Kansai photography scene. While their counterparts in Tokyo focused more on a journalistic approach to photography that highlighted social issues the Kansai photography clubs pursued a more modernist style approach.

Sakata Minoru was a Japanese photographer A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types ...

was a member of the Naniwa Photography Club but in 1934 became the leader of the Nagoya Photography Group.

References

{{reflist 1904 establishments in Japan Culture in Osaka Japanese photography organizations