Ken Domon’s Children: Photography Book

Ken Domon was also a master of "photographs of children".
Ken Domon began his career as a photojournalist in 1935. From his pre-war breakthrough works to his post-war masterpiece The Children of Chikuho, and through the 1950s — the difficult post-war period, an era when Japan had a great many children — 164 masterpieces are included! Lively, shining "children" in a single book!
After joining Nippon Kobo, a group that championed "photojournalism", in 1935 (Showa 10), he documented a turbulent Japan as a "photojournalist". Ken Domon, who took on a wide range of themes such as Bunraku, Hiroshima, The Children of Chikuho, Fubo (Portraits) and Koji Junrei (Pilgrimages to Old Temples) and left many timeless masterpieces in the history of photography, was also highly regarded for his photographs of children; before the war, a photograph of boys playing in the water, taken while on assignment in Izu, became one of his breakthrough works.
After the war he published snapshots of "children" in photography magazines. He frequented the Fukagawa area of Tokyo and even announced the publication of a photobook, Koto no Kodomo (Children of Koto), but, considering the social conditions of the time, gave it up himself.
In 1959 he covered the Chikuho coalfield region of northern Kyushu, where mines were closing one after another as the coal industry was rationalised amid the shift in Japan's industrial structure. Beginning with the sisters Rumie and Sayuri whom he met there, he documented the lives of coal miners struggling in poverty. He published the photobook The Children of Chikuho (Patria Shoten, 1960), printed on coarse paper and priced at 100 yen. It sold 100,000 copies and, together with its sequel Rumie-chan wa Otosan ga Shinda (Rumie's Father Died) (Kenkosha, 1960), became a major social topic and was adapted into a television drama and a film. Exhausted by this, he collapsed with a cerebral haemorrhage, and because of its after-effects he thereafter gave up shooting with a 35mm camera.
The photographs of children taken in the 1950s — playing vividly and carefree, overflowing with dynamism — warm the hearts of viewers across the ages. At the same time, they capture Japanese society and the times, and are valuable as a record of Japan before its period of high economic growth.

Publisher: Crevis
Publication year: 2022
Pages: 192
Dimensions: 258 × 195 mm

Ken Domon / Children Photography / Showa Era