They might have been shot in a shadowy New York street in the '30s, at a Parisian cafe in the '50s, or in the middle of a Vietnamese battlefield in the '60s . . . The settings and contexts of the 260 photographs currently on display at "The Century of Photography Exhibition" at Ginza's Matsuya department store obviously diverge, but they come together in their ineffable impressions.
An exhibition of such a massive scale runs the risk of glutting one's appetite, even that of an aficionado, despite the presence of such masters as Eugene Atget, Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Robert Capa and William Klein.
Fully aware of this problem, Osamu Hiraki, photography critic and show curator, worked hard to organize the works into four easy-to-follow categories (and included a fifth section dedicated to portraits of 60 luminaries, such as John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley and so on). According to Hiraki, the exhibition's purpose is to capture the essence of the 20th century through photographs, the most eloquent witnesses of history.