The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts’ Virtual Museum

Works by 25 Photographers in Their 20s

July 9, 2020, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (K*MoPA) and we would like to express our sincerest gratitude for everybody’s understanding and support over many years.
2020 has also seen the world confronted with the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, creating great difficulties for numerous people and undoubtedly, there are still people who are unable to visit museums in person. Consequently, we decided to postpone the 25th Anniversary Special Exhibition, (Eikoh Hosoe Respective Exhibition), giving priority instead to the annual ‘Young Portfolio Exhibition’, which has been held every year since 1995.
Given this situation, the museum staff gave serious consideration to what we can do to help. The solution we came up with was to create a ‘Virtual Collection Exhibition’ as part of our 25th anniversary celebration project, allowing the works to be viewed freely on smartphones or computers anywhere throughout the world.
For the first event in this project, we decided to return to the museum’s origins and recreate our very first exhibition, ‘Works by 25 Photographers in Their 20s’, on our website. This exhibition, which was held to celebrate the opening of the museum in 1995, aimed to encourage young photographers by selecting five works each by leading photographers of the time that they created while they were still in their twenties. These were then acquired for the collection and exhibited in the museum.
In addition to these works, the photographers who have given their support to this ‘Virtual Museum’ project will also present the texts on the theme, ‘To young people’, that they wrote by hand or word processor, for the catalogue of the original exhibition. The early works and words of these ‘25 Photographers’ remain fresh to this day and I feel sure that they will provide encouragement for the young photographers throughout the world who will carry the profession into the future. I will also be very happy if it offers a moment of peace to people who have become exhausted, both physically and mentally by the COVID-19 disaster.
We all hope that you will enjoy spending time to view our ‘Virtual Museum’ and that you will be able to come and visit the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in person in not too distant future.

October 28, 2020
Eikoh Hosoe
Director
Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts