(b Sakata, 25 Oct 1909; d 1990). Japanese photographer. He wanted to be a painter but in 1933, feeling his talent to be limited, he became a technician in the Kotaro Miyauchi Photography Studio in Tokyo, where he studied the techniques of portrait photography. In 1935 he joined the staff of the Nippon Kobo (‘Japan studio’) agency, headed by Yonosuke Natori, and took photographs for Nippon, a magazine designed to provide an introduction to Japanese culture for foreigners. In 1939 he left and began to photograph examples of traditional Japanese culture, such as bunraku (‘puppet theatre’) and the Buddhist temple Muroji near Nara. At the same time he began to take portraits of cultural figures such as painters, writers and musicians. He received the first ARS photography cultural award in 1943. From 1950 he became a judge of the monthly contest in the photography magazine Camera (Tokyo) and his advocacy of ‘realism photography’ was very influential on amateur photographers. His method of documenting the contradictions of society as directly as possible was perfected in the two collections Hiroshima (Tokyo, 1958) and Chikuho no kodomotachi (‘The children of Chikuho’; Tokyo, 1960). From the 1960s he concentrated on photographing temple architecture and Buddhist images; these works are collected in the series Koji junrei (‘Old temple pilgrimage’; 5 vols, Tokyo, 1963–75). In 1983 the Domon Ken Memorial Museum was founded in Sakata to commemorate his achievements.

• Domon, Ken
  • Japan, §XXI, 2(i)(d): Japanese museums: Specialist