I spent a couple of hours last week at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In case any other readers of this forum are headed to Japan, I thought I'd post a few notes...

First of all, their web page is http://www.tokyo-photo-museum.or.jp/eng/index.html It's got location information and hours. The entry was 1,000 yen for the permanent collection and the special exhibit "Alfred Stieglitz and his Contemporaries".

The Stieglitz exhibit consisted mostly of pages from his publication "Camera Works" (I hope I'm getting all of the names spelled correctly here). The photos from the magazine were all high quality gravure reproductions. In a few cases there were two prints of the same photo, one Gravure, and one from another process (usually platinum or silver). It was interesting to compare the renditions. There were a few other original prints, unrelated to those from the magazine.

There was an introductory essay in the exhibit in both English and Japanese, and each print had a small card identifying in, also both in English and Japanese. There was a longer essay on Stieglitz' life in Japanese only -- too long for me to stand there and read it. There was also a description (in Japanese) of the various processes used for prints in the exhibit -- several were present.

Samples of the catalog were available. I thumbed through briefly. There were more English translations than in the exhibit itself.

The other two exhibits were from the permanent collection, the first was Photography and the Media. It concentrated on early photo books depicting Japan -- mostly from the late 19th or early 20th century.

The final exhibit described the history of photographic technology. There were many cameras from Japan, Europe and the US, Holograms, video, and CD-ROM images.

All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. The museum was not crowded in early afternoon on a Thursday. There were several other people or small groups in the Stieglitz room, fewer in the other parts. The surrounding Ebisu Garden Place is very new construction in Tokyo, and is an interesting look at recent Japanese thinking on urban planning and architecture -- as opposed to the "no planning, painted flat concrete slab architecture" that's standard in most of Japan.

-- Mike rosenlof (), October 31, 1997