This weekend the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany, openend a major exhibition on photography: 

“Photography Calling!”

The exhibition includes ca. 30 photographers from the USA and Europe from the 1960s until today.

“Photography Calling!” is a great title, but based on the title I guess Asian photography and especially Japanese photography didn’t make enough noise, because it wasn’t heard by the curators of the show.

Daido Moriyama: Japans Scenic Trio. Mutsumatsushima, 1974 ©Daido Moriyama

Aim of the show is:

The exhibition PHOTOGRAPHY CALLING! conducts in a contrapuntal dialogue with the works of younger photographers a discussion on the documentary in photography. The exhibition poses questions concerning traditions, relationships and differences: how, for example, does Diane Arbus formulate her question about the middle of American society in New York towards the end of the 1960s, and how does Boris Mikhailov answer this question in Germany of 2008? How do Robert Adams and John Gossage depict the changes in the American landscape under the effect of civilization –  And what is the contemporary answer to the male voyeuristic gaze in Winogrand’s photographs of New York women? Is there an Eastern European answer, albeit from a different time and tradition, to the self-portraits of Lee Friedlander of the 1960s and 1970s?
[Quote: Sprengel Museum]  

The exhibition which wants to “conduct in a contrapuntal dialogue on the documentary in photography” follows the old world view until the end of the 1990’s that ignored Asian photography, and especially Japanese photography, completely. The above formulated questions show, that American photographers are being seen almost exclusively as the primary inventors of new positions in documentary photography.

Of course Arbus, Adams, e.g., are major photographers whose work was extremely influential, but to talk about documentary photography while ignoring ‘game changers’ like Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi and Nobuyoshi Araki is in my opinion an outdated view on the history of photography. 

Shomei Tomatsu: ”Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation and Fire, Nagasaki”, 1961 ©Shomei Tomatsu