Lot 73: Yamagata, Obanazawa, Hanagasa Matsuri ['Flower Hat' Festival in Obanazawa, Yamagata Prefecture] from 'Fushi Kaden', 27 August 1976

SUDA ISSEI (b.1940)
Yamagata, Obanazawa, Hanagasa Matsuri ['Flower Hat' Festival in Obanazawa, Yamagata Prefecture] from 'Fushi Kaden', 27 August 1976
gelatin silver print
signed in Japanese in pencil on verso
8½ x 8 3/8in. (21.5 x 21.2cm.)

Camera Mainichi, February 1977, within feature 'Fushi Kaden 5: Michinoku no aki' [Autumn in the Northeast]; Suda, Fushi Kaden, Asahi Sonorama, 1978, pl.39 (figs.1-2); Sengo shashin to tohoku 2 [Post-war Photography and the Northeast], Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai, 1992, p.69, no.101; Suda Issei: Nihon no shashinka 40 [Japanese Photographers, Vol.40], Iwanami Shoten, 1998, front cover & pl.7.

From the artist;
acquired by present owner.

JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY SINCE 1960

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, TOKYO
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
This image of two young women dressed in kimono was taken by Suda while visiting Yamagata's Hanagasa Matsuri, one of the largest summer festivals in Northeast Japan. He made a total of six prints of this image in two paper sizes: 10x8in and 12x10in. The present lot is one of only three vintage prints on 12x10in paper.

Suda's seminal series Fushi Kaden was serialised in Camera Mainichi in 1975-77 and published as a book in 1978 (fig.1). From 1971 to 1977, Suda moved away from his commercial work and immersed himself in Fushi Kaden, a personal project in which he travelled throughout Japan and captured -- within the square frame of his favoured 6x6 Hasselblad camera -- what curator Yamagishi Shoji calls 'things that lie just below the surface of a modernized Japan, evoking nostalgia and a feeling for the past.' (foreword, Japan: A Self-Portrait, ICP, 1979, p.16) Suda was one of the 18 Japanese photographers selected for the 1979 exhibition Japan: A Self-Portrait, curated by Yamagishi and Cornell Capa and shown at the International Center of Photography, New York.