安齊重男

Anzai Shigeo, who devoted his career to documenting the art world through photography, was known for describing himself not as a photographer but as an art documentarian or a “companion” of contemporary artists.1 Born in 1939 in Atsugi City, Kanagawa Prefecture, he graduated from the Applied Chemistry Department of Kanagawa Prefectural Hiratsuka High School in 1957. While working at the Central Technical Research Laboratory of Nippon Oil, he taught himself to paint, and after leaving the company in 1964 he began showing geometric abstract paintings made with a ruling pen at open-call exhibitions and galleries. In the late 1960s he purchased a Nikkormat (marketed in Japan as Nikomat) at a camera shop in Jiyūgaoka (Tokyo), where he was living at the time. Around the same period he frequented Tamura Gallery, which opened in 1969 in Nihonbashi Honchō (Tokyo), and developed close ties with Lee Ufan and with Tama Art University graduates such as Yoshida Katsurō and Honda Shingo. The young artists who gathered at Tamura Gallery were working with unmodified materials and developing site-specific practices that explored relationships between objects, or between objects and space, as well as the situations those relationships created. They would later come to be known collectively as Mono-ha (the “School of Things”). While Anzai recognized the importance of these experiments, which were temporary by their very nature, he also felt a sense of urgency regarding the fact that everything would be dismantled and disappear once the exhibitions ended. Encouraged by Lee Ufan, he began photographing the short-lived works with a 35mm film camera around 1969 to 1970. Another event often cited as defining his role as a “companion” was the 10th Tokyo Biennale, held in May 1970 with Nakahara Yūsuke as commissioner and the theme of “Between Man and Matter.” Anzai participated as an assistant and documentary photographer for Daniel Buren, Richard Serra, Christo, and others, working closely with them and documenting their projects, including the processes through which they were made. The photographs Anzai produced during this period, documenting ephemeral works, exhibition spaces, production and installation processes, and the artists themselves, have become indispensable resources for research and exhibitions on art of the 1970s. Most were made on his own initiative and at his own expense as he embedded himself at the sites. His images show almost no intent to emphasize particular subjects through close-ups or tight framing. Lee described this quality in Anzai’s images, which at times have an intentionally soft focus, by noting that Anzai was “drawn not to isolated forms but to the wider field created by relationships between things, and between things and their surroundings,”2 finding in this sensibility a connection with Mono-ha’s interests. In 1974, Anzai traveled to Europe with Sekine Nobuo for the exhibition “Japan at Louisiana” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and continued on to visit several European countries, marking the beginning of his activities overseas. From 1978 to 1979 he lived in New York on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and documented the city’s emerging art scene, including performances at the alternative space The Kitchen. This year-long experience had a major impact on him, and after returning to Japan he began actively communicating developments in contemporary art through lectures, writing, and exhibitions. During the 1980s and 1990s, as he documented international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta and photographed visiting artists including Joseph Beuys, he received an increasing number of commissions for photography, photo essays, and interviews both in Japan and abroad, including from the American art magazine “Artforum.” Notably, his photographs and writings appeared not only in specialized art and photography journals but also in publications aimed at a broader readership, such as “Ryūko Tsūshin” and “Studio Voice.” During this period he also expanded his practice by publishing monographs devoted to individual artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Anthony Caro, as well as books on outdoor sculpture, which saw widespread interest at the time. In 2000 he completed “FREEZE,” a series of 100 large-format artist portraits. While Anzai had frequently exhibited his photographs since the 1970s, it was from the 1980s onward, as his number of solo gallery exhibitions grew, that the elements that would become hallmarks of his prints took shape: black borders, handwritten notes in the margins, and the tactile quality of hand-cut photographic paper. (There are early examples without black borders, particularly prints prepared for publication.) The format of the exhibition “Recording on Contemporary Arts 1970–1981” (1982, G Art Gallery, Tokyo), in which huge numbers of prints were mounted on the walls and even on the floor, established Anzai’s fundamental approach to exhibiting. After the two-person show “Shigeo Anzaï: dialogue of photography and sculpture: Anzaï/Maita” at The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura in 1994, he went on to hold large-scale solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2000, 2017) and the National Art Center, Tokyo (2007). At Tama Art University, where he taught as a visiting professor from 2004, he organized exhibitions linked to his teaching, including “By ANZAÏ—Artists Through Anzai’s Lens” and “By Anzaï: Contemporary Art and Tamabi” (both 2009) at the university art museum. He also held solo exhibitions abroad at venues such as Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art (Poland, 2002), Shanghai Art Museum (now China Art Museum, Shanghai, 2009), and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Art Museum, Beijing (2010). Anzai, who was present at sites of artistic activity for nearly half a century beginning in the 1970s, died of heart failure at the age of 81 on August 13, 2020. Until his final years, he prized what he described as “the antenna that allows me to pick up what is unfolding before me,”3 and he remained true to his calling as an art documentarian. The black borders characteristic of Anzai’s photographs were produced by filing down the opening of the negative carrier so the edges were exposed during development. This approach signaled his commitment to printing the entire image captured by the camera without imposing arbitrary cropping. In discussing exhibition formats, Anzai remarked that he wanted to “line the prints up in rows, making as few choices as possible,” creating “something like a visual chronology.”4 At some exhibitions, he showed several thousand prints. His rejection of cropping and hands-off approach to selection reflects his view that his photography should present “what ended up in the frame” rather than “what one set out to photograph.”5 At the same time, the black borders can be seen as frames that set each image apart from the world around it, while the handwritten notes in the margins and the torn, hand-worked edges of the paper lend an “aura” of uniqueness to works in a medium defined by reproducibility. Even with what appears to be minimal selectivity, strong intentions can be seen guiding his choice of subject matter.6 Prints of this nature are, of course, far from neutral documents, and are works in which the photographer’s agency is unavoidably present. The value of Anzai’s photographs as visual sources has only grown in recent years, and their use in exhibitions and scholarly research continues to expand. However, when employing them as primary materials, especially in cases where the original works no longer survive, one should recall Anzai’s own observation that “there is obviously a gap between works as photographed and as they really exist,”7 and remain attentive to the inherently ambiguous nature of his prints as both documents and works in their own right. Large numbers of Anzai’s photographs are in the collections of the National Museum of Art, Osaka; Artizon Museum, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; M+ (Hong Kong) and other institutions. Later in life, Anzai became increasingly conscious of producing prints with an eye toward their use as reference materials. In the ANZAÏ Photo Archive at the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the prints categorized not as artworks but as Reference Materials by the National Museum of Art, Osaka are on resin-coated (RC) paper rather than the baryta paper often used for vintage prints. While the images have black borders, no signatures or edition numbers are added, clearly distinguishing them from prints intended as artworks.8 A substantial body of archival materials also survives, including an enormous quantity of negatives left in his darkroom and prints used as the base image for publications. The entire collection of these materials was acquired by Tama Art University after Anzai’s death. Thorough organization and wider use of these materials are eagerly anticipated. (Taniguchi Eri / Translated by Christopher Stephens) (Published online: 2024-05-07) Notes 1. See Hirai Shoichi, “Shigeo Anzai and His Photography,” Anzaï: Personal Photo Archives 1970–2006 (Tokyo: The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2007), p. 11. 2. Lee Ufan, “Shasinkūkan no Rikigaku [Dynamics of Photographic Space],” Camera Mainichi (special feature “Shin Shashinron 4: Anzai Shigeo no Me [New Photography Theory 4: The Eye of Anzai Shigeo]”), vol. 30, no. 7, July 1983, p. 140. 3. “Gendaibijutsu e no Yasashī Manazashi: Anzai Shigeo no Shashinten [A Warm Gaze on Contemporary Art: Anzai Shigeo Photography Exhibition],” Sogetsu, no. 157, December 1984, p. 92. 4. Ibid., p. 90. 5. “Interview: Utsutte Shimatta Mono ga Hitoriaruki o Hajimeru: Āto ni Tsuite no Shashin [What Ends Up in the Frame Takes on a Life of Its Own: Photographs About Art],” Camera Mainichi (special feature “Shin Shashinron 4: Anzai Shigeo no Me [New Photography Theory 4: The Eye of Anzai Shigeo]”), op. cit., pp. 136–137. 6. Anzai stated, “Within the contemporary art scene, my selection of artists is quite biased” (ibid., p. 135). 7. “A Warm Gaze on Contemporary Art,” op. cit., p. 91. 8. This distinction in photographic papers applies only to these two institutions. Anzai prints on RC paper intended as artworks also exist.