Our cover features a 1951 “realist” photograph by Domon Ken titled Shoi gunjin, Ueno (Wounded Veteran, Ueno). Courtesy of Julia Adeney Thomas and reproduced with the permission of the Domon Ken Memorial Foundation, Sakata, Japan.
We begin with two articles on the history of photography in Asia. Julia Adeney Thomas opens this issue with a fascinating account of the animated debates over realism (riarizumu) that appeared in 1953 in the pages of one of Japan's photographic monthlies, Camera. The core of the debate over realism and the real, says Thomas, was political: Constituting reality through the work of the camera was an effort to make power visible in post-occupation Japan. And yet this bid for the real lacked ideological coherence. Socialism, democratic liberalism, and sentimental nationalism each gave realism and the real a different source and meaning in the relationship between subject, lens, and...
