villagers and farmers to their land in an area cov-
ered by snow four months of the year. Yet what
this series truly revealed can only be understood in
an immediate Japanese post-war context where it
can be seen as a reply to the rapid modernization
and the American occupation. Because the villagers
of Kuwadoridani are isolated, they do not benefit
from the technical progress, changes of mentality,
or Americanization of the urban spaces. But
neither are their time-honored traditions disturbed.
Hamaya used an original technique of oscillating
between larger, almost abstract, views that describe
the life of the people and intimate, close-up shots of
individuals such asWoman Planting Rice, 1955.
This photograph depicts a woman passing through
a rice field. A formal analysis of this picture can
elicit the interpretation that farmers are being left
by the wayside, but it can also be read as a quest for
more traditional values, a quest for identity, and a
specific form of awareness. This oscillating between
the documentary and personal reflection are a
unique character of early works by Hamaya.
Hamaya next passed many years taking pictures
of villages along the West coast of Japan. Much
like an ethnologist, he records work in the fields,
rituals, the way of living, and the organization of
rural society. These pictures were collected inUrah
Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast) of 1957. Hamaya
further developed and deepened his themes, bring-
ing to the fore the relations between the villagers
and the historic and geographic frame of the places
where they live, in lives punctuated by seasons and
ceremonies. Hamaya’s realism and his focus on
agriculture, fishing, and traditional folklore pro-
vide a counterpoint to the migration of people to
great urban centers in the massive modernization
of Japan of the 1940s and 1950s.
With these two collections, Hamaya secured his
reputation in Japanese photography circles. Further
success arrived when works from these series were
selected for the exhibitionThe Family of Manat the
Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955, which
also toured Japan. Hamaya secured another mile-
stone in Japanese photography with his entry to Mag-
num Photos in 1960, the first Japanese photographer
to join this Paris-based agency. Although Hamaya
traveled extensively on photojournalistic assignments,
his strongest work remained that which was realized
in his native land. In 1960, he published a series of
pictures entitled Okori to Kanashimi no Kiroku
(Record of Anger and Sadness), through which he
stands up against the Japanese government at the
time of the Japan-U.S Security Treaty (ANPO).
During the 1960s, however, portraits of Japanese
life gradually disappear from his work, although he
returned to the theme in 1976 with a series devoted
to the life of Japanese women in the Showa era. He
increasingly turned to what might be called natural
architecture portraits, taking up aerial photogra-
phy that results in a set of color, panoramic views
of Japan as published in collections entitledNihon
Retto ̈(The Japanese Archipelago)andLandscape
of Japan, 1960–1964. Through aerial photography
Hamaya turns his gaze to the world landscape,
shooting in America, Canada, Greenland, Austra-
lia, Algeria, Turkey, Western Europe, and most
dramatically, in Nepal with his extraordinary series
of black-and-white aerial views of the Himalayas.
These photographs are featured in two publica-
tions:Aspects of Nature(1980) andAspect of Life
(1981), and are more than landscapes. They are
better described as portraits of nature, wherein
Hamaya, with his lens, sculpts mineral and vegetal
components into a natural architectural order.
Although the aerial work on a formal level is
strikingly different than Hamaya’s earlier photo-
graphs, the consistent thread is the photographer’s
reliance on the notion of place. In the aerial works,
Hamaya seeks out places seeming to become, or at
the opposite end of the spectrum, are still wild. He
expresses strength through images of mountains or,
volcanoes in which nature is the sole law. More than
straightforward panoramas, his photographs, as in
those of icy landscapes or deserts, present an abun-
dance of details that require the viewer to create order
through observation and rational thought, much as
humans create order through their actions on nature.
A modest man, Hamaya often downplayed his
achievements, but was eloquent when he stated:
[I feel] photography is less creative than painting: some-
times I tell myself that I’m not a very creative person...but
at the same time I know that photography is more a matter
of finding than of creating. We wander round the world
trying to find things and to decide they are important.
(Interview with Frank Horvat, November 1988,Entre
Vues,Paris: Nathan, 1990)
Hamaya died in 1999 at his home in Kanagawa
Prefecture.
ThomasCYRIL
Seealso:Aerial Photography; Domon, Ken; Mag-
num Photos; Photography in JapanBiography
Born 1915, Ueno district, central Tokyo. Freelance photo-
grapher based in Tokyo 1937–1945. Member of Toho-
sha group, 1941–1942. Relocated to Takada, Niigata
Prefecture, 1945–1952; based in Oiso, Kanagawa Prefec-HAMAYA, HIROSHI