ABSTRACT

This chapter explores practice across Japan, focusing on the work of the photo clubs in Tokyo and Nagoya. It was Takiguchi Shuzo who articulated the relation between the Surrealist object and photography in Japanese, in an article published in Photo Times in August 1938. Regardless of its aestheticized view of the Surrealist object, Takiguchi’s ‘Object and Photography’ informed experiments with ‘photo objects’ on a significant scale. Firstly, Yamanaka Chiru establishes Freud’s psychoanalysis as a basis of ‘Surrealist psychology’. Sakata adds that the basics of Freudian theory are laid out in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis and that its main premise is that it is a ‘psychology of desire’. Shimozato Yoshio and Sakata Minoru find the specific mixture between abstraction and what they refer to as the ‘Freudian’ content – photographic renditions of sexual desire – especially potent. Sakata’s contributions offer similar views of the plant to that of Shimozato’s: B resembles A Balloon, whereas D looks like human skin.