{"title":"Seiji Kurata","description":"\u003cp\u003eSeiji Kurata (1945–2020) was a Tokyo-born photographer who trained under Daidō Moriyama and graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1968. His practice developed across photography, printmaking, and film before converging on the street as his primary subject.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWorking with flash and medium format through the 1970s and 1980s, Kurata documented the edges of Tokyo nightlife — bōsōzoku, gangsters, strippers, transvestites, and the underground subcultures that occupied the city's margins. The work is precise and unflinching, shot with a formal clarity that distinguishes it from documentary impulse. His debut, \u003cem\u003eFlash Up\u003c\/em\u003e (1980), won the fifth Kimura Ihei Award. Later publications extended his range across Japan and into Asia. \u003ca href=\"\/products\/eros-lost-seiji-kurata\" title=\"View Eros Lost by Seiji Kurata — available now at Lokator100\"\u003eEros Lost - Seiji Kurata\u003c\/a\u003e is among the titles currently available at Lokator100.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKurata's photobooks were published in limited runs by Japanese houses including Byakuya Shobō, Shinchōsha, and Ōta Shuppan. Most are now out of print and difficult to source. His prints are held in the permanent collections of the ICP in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBrowse the full range of photography publications in the \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/photography-photobooks\" title=\"Browse the full photobook catalogue at Lokator100\"\u003ePhotobooks\u003c\/a\u003e collection at Lokator100.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"eros-lost-seiji-kurata","title":"Eros Lost – Seiji Kurata","description":"\u003ch2\u003eEros Lost — Seiji Kurata\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eEros Lost\u003c\/em\u003e is a posthumous photobook published by \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/zen-foto-gallery\" title=\"Explore all Zen Foto Gallery publications available in the shop\"\u003eZen Foto Gallery\u003c\/a\u003e in 2020, assembled in close collaboration with the artist in the year before his death in February 2020. The book draws on Kurata's nude photography from the 1980s, presenting 79 images across 208 pages — many of them previously unpublished, reproduced from original negatives.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKurata's method in this body of work is precise and deliberate. Subjects are placed within interior environments — domestic rooms, furniture, machinery — and photographed under elaborate, constructed lighting. Poses are scripted rather than spontaneous, transforming the encounter between body and setting into something closer to visual theater. As editor Amanda Ling-Ning Lo writes in the afterword: \"Over a 40-year career, Kurata continued his dialogue with the camera. Can a certain moment become an eternity? Will the story of all existence be affirmed and accepted under the same sky?\" The photographs return repeatedly to questions of desire, memory, and the durability of the photographic moment itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKurata began publishing selections of this nude work in the magazines \u003cem\u003eShashin Jidai\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eShashin Sekai\u003c\/em\u003e between 1985 and 1989, collecting them in the photobook \u003cem\u003eQuest for Eros\u003c\/em\u003e in 1999–2000. \u003cem\u003eEros Lost\u003c\/em\u003e revisits that decade of work through images that did not find their way into earlier publications, drawn from Kurata's original negatives. Within \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/zen-foto-gallery\" title=\"Explore all Zen Foto Gallery publications available in the shop\"\u003eZen Foto Gallery\u003c\/a\u003e's publishing programme — which has consistently focused on Japanese photographers working outside mainstream commercial frameworks — the book represents a considered editorial act of recovery and recontextualization.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"\/collections\/seiji-kurata\" title=\"Browse all Seiji Kurata titles in the catalogue\"\u003eSeiji Kurata\u003c\/a\u003e (1945–2020) was born in Tokyo and graduated from the Workshop School of Photography in 1976, having studied at Tokyo University of the Arts under Shomei Tomatsu and others. His debut book \u003ca href=\"\/products\/flash-up-2013-new-edition-seiji-kurata\" title=\"View Flash Up by Seiji Kurata — Kimura Ihei Award-winning debut photobook\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eFlash Up\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (1980) received the Kimura Ihei Award for its documentation of Tokyo's nightlife — motorcycle gangs, yakuza, cabarets — and established his reputation within Japanese photography. Subsequent publications — \u003cem\u003ePhoto Cabaret\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eGreat Asia\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e'80s Family\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eJapan\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eQuest for Eros\u003c\/em\u003e — extended that work across four decades. His photographs have been shown internationally, including at Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis title is part of the \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/photography-photobooks\" title=\"Browse the full photobook catalogue at Lokator100\"\u003ePhotography \u0026amp; Photobooks\u003c\/a\u003e catalogue at Lokator100.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Zen Foto Gallery","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52016761700698,"sku":"9784905453918","price":67.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0946\/3359\/1130\/files\/eros-lost-seiji-kurata-front-cover.jpg?v=1778624354"},{"product_id":"flash-up-2013-new-edition-seiji-kurata","title":"Flash Up – 2013 New Edition — Seiji Kurata","description":"\u003ch2\u003eFlash Up — Seiji Kurata's Document of 1970s Tokyo\u003c\/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFlash Up\u003c\/em\u003e is a sustained photographic record of the nocturnal and marginal zones of 1970s Tokyo. Originally published in 1980 by Byakuya-Shobo, it earned \u003ca target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"\/collections\/seiji-kurata\"\u003eSeiji Kurata\u003c\/a\u003e the Ihei Kimura Award that same year and remains one of the most direct and unsentimental accounts of that city's underworld in postwar Japanese photography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAbout the Book\u003c\/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eKurata's camera moves through Ikebukuro and Shinjuku with the composure of a trained observer. The subjects are specific: yakuza, Bosozoku in street confrontations, ultra-right wingers at Meiji Jingu and on rural tour, nightclub hostesses, salarymen, car crash victims. The photographs do not aestheticize their subjects. Shot in medium format, they carry a journalistic clarity that distinguishes Kurata's approach from the more expressionistic work associated with his teachers Daido Moriyama and Araki Nobuyoshi. Where those photographers pushed grain and contrast toward abstraction, Kurata holds the image open — enough information enters the frame for a narrative to form in the viewer's mind without the photograph closing it off. A bleeding figure on a Ikebukuro street, surrounded by onlookers, while a well-dressed man in the crowd smiles directly at the lens: the image is documentary and strange in equal measure.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKurata described the project in his afterword as rooted in the four years following the launch of \u003cem\u003eStreet Photo Random\u003c\/em\u003e in 1975 — a period of deliberate attention to the overlooked and the contingent, working against the noise of everyday life rather than through it. The photographs in \u003cem\u003eFlash Up\u003c\/em\u003e are the accumulation of that discipline.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eThe 2013 Edition\u003c\/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis edition was published in 2013 by \u003ca target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"\/collections\/zen-foto-gallery\"\u003eZen Foto Gallery\u003c\/a\u003e as a large-format hardcover with slipcase. It reproduces the original 1980 publication at high quality and includes two essays by Kurata in both English and Japanese. The edition is limited to 750 copies. At 383 × 265 × 30 mm and 184 pages with 140 images, it presents the work at a scale appropriate to the photographs' density of detail.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor buyers interested in the full range of Kurata's published work, \u003ca target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"\/products\/eros-lost-seiji-kurata\"\u003eEros Lost\u003c\/a\u003e is also available in the shop.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Zen Foto Gallery","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54403712483674,"sku":"KURATA-FLASHUP-2013","price":200.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0946\/3359\/1130\/files\/flash-up-2013-new-edition-seiji-kurata-cover.jpg?v=1783612114"}],"url":"https:\/\/lokator100.store\/collections\/seiji-kurata.oembed","provider":"Lokator100","version":"1.0","type":"link"}