Serenity
静寂
- Birth Year
- 1876
- Death Year
- 1943
- Date
- ca. 1929
- Technique, Material, Format
- gelatin silver print
- Dimension
- 26.5 x 33.8 cm
- Donor name
- Mr. Arakida Yoshihiko
- Category
- Photograph or Moving Image by JapanesePhotographer/Artist
- Inventory Number
- 2018-PHJ-024
Three seagulls stand on a sandy beach. The photograph shows only the rippled pattern in the sand and the seagulls, and it is not possible to know where this beach is or what kind of scenery surrounds it. However, the combination of the geometric pattern and the title, Serenity, suggests the artist did intend for this to be an abstract work. In fact, if you look at the negative from which this was printed, you can see that more of the sandy beach and even waves were originally visible in the upper left of the image. The artist obviously cropped those parts to create his desired composition. Kono Asahachi was a photographer who specialized in such abstract images. Active in the United States before the war, his work was exhibited in photography salons around the world.
(OSAWA Sayoko)
■Related
・Osawa Sayoko “Research Notes: Basic Research on U.S.-resident Japanese Photographers in the 1920s-1940s : An Outline and Chronology of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California”(PDF)
（”Bulletin of Yokohama Museum of Art,” No. 23, Yokohama Museum of Art, 2022, pp. 5, 9-28 [in Japanese], 135 [summery in English]）