Bishin Jumonji

Bishin Jumonji (十文字 美信, Jūmonji Bishin^?) is a photographer who has done advertising, portrait, architectural, and other work.

Jumonji was born in Yokohama on 4 March 1947. After studying at the Tokyo College of Photography he worked as an assistant to Kishin Shinoyama and went freelance in 1971, when he was the cameraman for advertisements for Matsushita Electric and Shiseido products.

The association with Matsushita would later bring awards from the Art Directors Club every year from 1975 till 1979. Jumonji has continued to do editorial and commercial work (notably for Hayashibara Biochemical Laboratories); while much of this owes a lot to its art direction as well as photography, Jumonji's advertising work has been uncommonly ambitious and witty.

In 1972 he joined an exhibition of portraits (in Kinokuniya Gallery at Shinjuku) of Simon Yotsuya, with nine other photographers.

Jumonji had started taking his "Untitled" series of portraits of people framed to exclude their heads in 1971. In 1972, these appeared in the magazine Camera Mainichi and were shown in the Neikrug gallery in New York; a year later they were included within "New Japanese Photography", at the New York MoMA.

Down till 1980, Jumonji made nineteen trips to Hawaiʻi, photographing the islands and photographing and interviewing elderly first-generation Japanese immigrants. The series counterposes color photographs of Hawaiʻi and black-and-white portraits of the people living there. Installments were published in Camera Mainichi in 1979 and the set was exhibited in 1980, when it won the Ina Nobuo Award. It was published, as Orchid Boat, in 1981.

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