Japanese photography in the USSR: through exhibitions and magazines. Features of historiography

The article examines the history of the presentation of Japanese photography in the USSR in the period from the 1920s to the 1990s. The Soviet art history has chosen its own approach to interpreting and shaping the processes associated with contemporary Japanese artists in the field of photography. This included the exhibition activities, mono-national and international exhibitions, as well as publications in magazines and newspapers, especially in the specialized ones (“Sovetskoye Foto”). Thematic and visual requirements, as well as the lack of researchers in the field of Japanese photography, led to the fact that the USSR developed its own idea of the actual state of the Japanese photography, as well as its own group of the Japanese photographers who most often appeared in magazines and exhibitions. The consequences of this alternative historiography have strongly influenced the representation of the Japanese photographers in the post-Soviet period, demonstrating numerous research gaps and the lack of development of this topic in the present. The materials used in this article include all kinds of publications on the Japanese photography written during the Soviet period from several magazines (“Kultura i zhizn’”, “Sovetskoye Foto”, “Tvorchestvo”, etc.), as well as the materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation. At the end of the article, the author gives the first bibliographic list of publications in the USSR on the topic of the Japanese photography.