More Than One World – New Japanese Photography 50 Years On

Catalogue and Critical Survey of Japanese Photography, Fifty Years After MoMA

More Than One World – New Japanese Photography 50 Years On serves a dual purpose: it is the official catalogue of the Japanese Photobooks T3 Photography Festival Tokyo 2024 and a sustained critical examination of where Japanese photography stands today. Its intellectual anchor is the 50th anniversary of the 1974 MoMA exhibition New Japanese Photography — the show that first brought a generation of Japanese photographers to sustained international attention and whose curatorial choices continue to shape how the medium is read and historicised.

The book does not treat 1974 as a monument. Across four chapters, it interrogates the exhibition's legacy with some distance: reconsidering its historical significance, recovering perspectives that were marginalised or absent, mapping the expanded field of contemporary Japanese photography, and speculating on possible futures. The result is less a retrospective than a reckoning.

Contributions come from a broad range of positions — curators, critics, historians, researchers, and editors working across Japan, Europe, and North America. Among the contributors are Sandra Phillips (Curator Emerita of Photography, SFMOMA), Roxana Marcoci (Acting Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA), Marc Feustel, Ivan Vartanian, Diane Dufour (Founder, LE BAL), and Mika Kobayashi, whose work addresses photography and gender representations. Essays and interviews are presented in illustrated form throughout. All texts appear in both English and Japanese.

Published by AKAAKA Art Publishing in 2025, the volume sits within a longer tradition of critical Photobooks that treat the medium as a subject of historical and theoretical inquiry rather than mere display.