Untitled (hiyoshi-mamoru)

A twenty-fifth untitled work by Hiyoshi Mamoru. His Showa-era printmaking practice extended the Japanese woodblock tradition's historical interest in genre subjects — the everyday activities of ordinary people — into the mid-twentieth century, a period when this tradition faced competition from photography and film as means of documenting social reality. Hiyoshi Mamoru's choice of the traditional woodblock medium for documentary work reflects a belief in the medium's distinctive capacities for rendering the visual character of social scenes.