THE PEOPLE by KISHIN Kishin Shinoyama

*Available only in Europe

*This book is secondhand.

"THE PEOPLE by KISHIN: The Power of Photography" (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2012) is the compilation of Kishin Shinoyama's large touring exhibition "Shashin-ryoku / THE PEOPLE by KISHIN." Shinoyama (1940–2024), trained at Nihon University, was a national photographer who chronicled postwar Japan's stars and cultural moods—from the "Double Fantasy" cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono to the record-breaking nude book "Santa Fe" and the "gekisha" phenomenon. At the heart of the project is the idea of "photographic power" (shashin-ryoku): photography's unique capacity to hurl a person's presence and vital energy at the viewer at larger-than-life scale. In enormous prints, it gathers legends who have passed, such as Yukio Mishima and Hibari Misora, alongside stars of successive eras like Momoe Yamaguchi, Seiko Matsuda, and AKB48, together with festive spectacle such as kabuki, the nude body, and images from the areas devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami (linked to his "ATOKATA" work). Both a record of individual celebrities and a portrait of "the people" who lived each era, the exhibition toured Japan for some seven years, closing in 2019. The book asks us to feel, bodily, the elemental force of the photographic medium.