Book launchWednesday 9 September 2020
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible Avant-Garde
This event will start at 12 BST (British Summer Time)
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Fully bookedDespite the censorship of dissident material during the decade between the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, a number of photographers across Japan produced a versatile body of Surrealist work. In a pioneering study of their practice, Jelena Stojković draws on primary sources and extensive archival research in order to map out art historical and critical contexts relevant to the apprehension of this rich photographic output, most of which is previously unseen outside of its country of origin. Richly illustrated, the volume is an essential resource in the fields of Surrealism and Japanese history of art, for researchers and students of historical avant-gardes and photography, as well as for readers interested in visual culture.
In this book launch, the author was joined in discussion of the book’s themes by Dr Luke Gartlan and Dr Tessel Bauduin. It was hosted as an online webinar. Discounted copies of the book were available to attendees.
Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible Avant-Garde by Dr Jelena Stojković is published by Routledge. It is available for purchase via this link. A discount voucher was provided for attendees of this event.
Presentation by Dr Jelena StojkovićA video of the event can be found here:
About the contributors
Dr Jelena Stojković (author)
Dr Jelena Stojković is Lecturer in History and Theory of Photography at the Arts University Bournemouth. An art historian and critic specialising in art and photography in Japan, she was previously Japan Foundation Fellow affiliated with the University of Tokyo and Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
Dr Luke Gartlan
Dr Luke Gartlan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Brill, 2016) and co-editor of Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (Routledge, 2017) and Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays in Colonial Representation (Getty, 2013). He served for six years as editor of the journal History of Photography.
Dr Tessel M. Bauduin
Dr Tessel M. Bauduin is Associate Professor in Modern Art at the Open University, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of a special issue of Stedelijk Studies on ‘Modernism in Migration’ (2019), an issue of The Journal of Art Historiography on ‘The Canonisation of Modernism’ (2018) and Surrealism, Occultism and Politics (2017). She has published on surrealist medievalism, Hieronymus Bosch, and Paul Éluard’s art collection, among many other subjects. Her monograph Surrealism and the Occult came out in 2014.