Japan Modern | People

Yamamura Gasho

(born Osaka, 1939–1987)

Yamamura began photographing in high school, focusing mainly on the children in his neighborhood. In 1959, he turned his attention to Americans living in Washington Heights, a residential area in central Tokyo that housed soldiers and their families. His images of American children, shot through fences or wearing masks, convey not only a sense of sinister strangeness and distance, but also the stark economic differences between American and Japanese children immediately after the war. He began photographing plants in the mid-1970s and continued to do so until his sudden death in 1987.


Works in Japan Modern: