Another artist I will be looking at is Horiji Kubota. Kubota is a Japanese photographer who became a freelance photographer in 1965. His first assignment was for the UK newspaper The Times was to Jackson Pollock’s grave in East Hampton and in 1968, Kubota returned to live in Japan, where his work was recognised with a Publishing Culture Award from Kodansha in 1970. The following year he became a Magnum associate. He witnessed the fall of Saigon (Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam) in 1975, refocusing his attention on Asia. It took him several years to get permission to photograph in China because of their strict laws. Finally, between 1979 and 1984, he embarked on a 1,000-day tour, during which he made more than 200,000 photographs. The book and exhibit, China, appeared in 1985.
I specifically looked at his project on The Contradictions of Modern Japan, where he took photos his home country in 2002 and photographed how Japan is evolving. It is a well-known fact that Japan is a very fast developing country with high technology and a fast economic growth. His aim was to capture all this in his images. Of course in the early 2000s their technology was not the same as it is now but his photos show that even at the beginning of the 21st century they were ahead of everyone.
