SHOTARO AKIYAMA, Watashi no Shigoto / My Work, Nippon Shashin Kikaku, 1976

Issued on 25 March 1976 as a special supplementary volume of Nippon Photo Contest by Nippon Shashin Kikaku / 日本写真企画, Tokyo, Watashi no Shigoto / 私の仕事 [My Work] is a substantial mid-career survey of Japanese photographer Shotaro Akiyama (秋山射太郎). Softcover, Japanese. Colour and black-and-white photography. Original price ¥1,800. Printed in Japan.

Akiyama emerged after the Second World War as one of Japan’s most recognisable portrait photographers. His early reputation was built through photographs of actresses — beginning with the celebrated Setsuko Hara — before his studio practice expanded across cinema, television, literature, painting, politics, sport and the broader machinery of Japanese celebrity. From the 1960s onward, following his European travels in 1960, flowers became a second major and increasingly personal subject.

My Work gathers those careers into one book, and the covers stage the division almost too neatly to be accidental. The front establishes the image-world that made his reputation: a woman’s face, bare shoulder, controlled studio light, black background — intimacy manufactured with absolute precision. The rear turns to a red rose, flowering cherry trees, green foliage, and a cropped fragment of a nude torso. Woman and flower. Body and blossom. Public image and private fixation.

This is less a conventional monograph than a magazine-world career summary — a working photographer’s account of what “my work” actually consisted of by 1976. Actresses photographed within the era’s cinema and gravure culture sit alongside nude studies, senior artists and writers, political figures and nationally recognised personalities. Few photographic careers could move routinely between glamour, fine art, government and mass entertainment without changing visual languages completely. Akiyama’s did.

The publication context makes the object better still. My Work did not emerge from a museum retrospective but through Nippon Photo Contest — a magazine world of competitions, instruction, professional technique and reader participation. Photography presented inside the system that taught people how photographs were made, judged and circulated. The title consequently feels unusually exact.

Read our journal entry on The New Rare at Glue Book Fair 2026.