Osamu Shiihara (椎原治) was a Japanese photographer born on 3 October 1905 in

Osaka City is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third-most populous city in Japan, following the special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population ...

. In 1932, Shiihara entered the

Tokyo School of Fine Arts or is a school of art and music in Japan. Located in Ueno Park, it also has facilities in Toride, Ibaraki, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Kitasenju and Adachi, Tokyo. The university has trained artists in the fields of painting, sculpture, crafts, inter- ...

. He studied in the Western Painting department under the tutelage of Takeji Fujishima. After finishing his studies in 1932, he came back to the Kansai area of Japan and started photography. He established a small photography studio in Nishinomiya city in Hyogo prefecture. It was around this time that he joined the

Tampei Photography Club The was a group based in Osaka from 1930 until 1941 that promoted avant-garde and, toward the end, socially concerned photography. The group was founded around the photographer Bizan Ueda, among photographers who bought their supplies from the ...

. Shiihara utilized many avant-garde photographic techniques such as

photogram A photogram is a Photography, photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The usual result is a negative shadow im ...

solarization,

photomontage Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final imag ...

and photo peinture. He utilized his formal artistic education and drew directly on the glass plates negatives that were then printed onto photographic printing paper. His work not only utilized experimental techniques but was modern due to his chosen subject matter. Female nudes featured prominently in his works. According to Shiihara's son, Tamotsu Shiihara, his father, in parallel with his photographic works, would paint large scenery paintings. In an essay Tamotsu quotes his father's statement in the monograph ''Light (Hikari)'': "photography has developed under the influence of painting, however, now is the time that it must be real to itself and take its own path as photography, different from the path of painting." His commitment to the creation of photography as an art form unique from painting is clear. He believed that photography and painting should develop independently from each other. In the years that he was active as a photographer, Shiihara painted over 100 of large scenery paintings. In a statement about his father's art, Tamotsu states:

Having learnt western painting at the Tokyo Fine arts School, he relied on his artistic sensibility and the techniques that he had obtained there and took pride in them. I think it is due to this that he resolutely challenged both the medium of photography and painting during the years.

Shiihara is also known for his contribution to the ''Wandering Jew'' series that documented the plight of Jewish refugees temporarily staying in Kobe during the Pacific War as they awaited visas to enter the United States and South America. He worked other members of the

Nakaji Yasui (15 December 1903 – 15 March 1942) was one of the most prominent photographers in the first half of the 20th century in Japan. Life Yasui was born in Osaka and became a member of the Naniwa Photography Club (, ''Naniwa Shashin Kurabu'') in 1 ...

, Toru Kono,

Kaneyoshi Tabuchi was a renowned Japanese photographer A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who uses a camera to make photo ...

, Kametaro Kawasaki, and Yutaka Tezuka. He eventually moved to Osaka after the war. He continued photography and in 1953 helped to establish the Spiegel Photographers Association with Tanahashi Shisui. Shiihara's work is in permanent collections inside and outside of Japan. His work is in The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; the J. Paul Getty Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Art Institute of Chicago.

References

{{Authority control 1905 births 1974 deaths Japanese photographers