Hiroji Kubota Photographer is a retrospective exhibition composed of two parts: platinum prints of black-and-white photographs made from 1963 to 1989, featured at Aperture Gallery until January 14th, 2016; and dye-transfer prints made from 1978 to 2003, featured on the ground floor of Aperture Gallery’s building at Sundaram Tagore Gallery until January 5th, 2016. This exhibition is in conjunction with the publication Hiroji Kubota Photographer (Aperture, 2015), the first comprehensive survey of veteran Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota’s work.
Spanning over fifty years of his extraordinary life and world travels, Hiroji Kubota Photographer encompasses the best images from Kubota’s life’s work. Rooted in his experience of Japan, ravaged by destruction and famine at the end of World War II, Kubota’s work is characterized by a desire to find beauty and honor in human experience. The exhibition includes examples of all his key bodies of work, including photographs from his many extended trips throughout China, Burma, the U.S., North and South Korea, and his home country, Japan. As Elliott Erwitt states in his preface to the book, Kubota “has produced a remarkable view of our world.”
Sponsored by Canon
Additional support by Fujifilm
Aperture’s exhibitions are funded in part by an award from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Charina Endowment Fund.
About the Artist
Hiroji Kubota (born in Tokyo, 1939) began his career assisting Magnum photographers René Burri, Burt Glinn, and Elliott Erwitt on their visit to Japan in 1961. Becoming a Magnum photographer himself, he produced major bodies of work on the United States, Japan, China, North and South Korea, and Southeast Asia. His numerous publications include China (1985), From Sea to Shining Sea: A Portrait of America (1992), Out of the East: Transition and Tradition in Asia (1997), and Japan (2004). His work has been exhibited around the world, including at the International Center of Photography, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo.
You may also like
8 Photobooks that Consider How Artists Engage with the Environment
From Kimowan Metchewais’s layered images on Indigenous identity to Robert Adams’s meditations on the American West, here are titles that explore the relationship between photography and the natural world.
Picturing Britain’s Working Class after the “End of History”
An exhibition in England asks how a generation of blue-collar British photographers have responded to the rising tide of neoliberalism.
Location Details:
Aperture Gallery
547 W 27th Street Floor 4
New York, NY 10001
Aperture Gallery hours:
Opening reception:
Talk and book signing: