Newspaper Photographers

Newspaper Photographers, from Wada Sanzo's Shōwa Shokugyō Emaki, records one of the modern professions that the series brought into the lineage of fūzoku-ga. The composition likely shows one or more press photographers in Western suits and felt hats, gripping plate cameras with flash bulbs, perhaps clustered in the posture of working reporters at an event. Wada handles the figures with the flat color massing and firm keyblock outline that characterize the series, and the print uses unmodulated planes — black suit jackets, cream shirts, the metallic body of the camera — rather than tonal shading. The subject is significant within Wada's project: where Edo ukiyo-e had recorded courtesans and kabuki actors, the Shōwa series extended that documentary instinct to typists, dentists, factory workers and, here, the newly central figure of the press photographer. The sheet reflects the sōsaku-hanga ideal of artist-designed mokuhanga while retaining the populist subject matter of earlier woodblock traditions.