Iwao Yamawaki

This is the first monograph illustrating the fascinating visual experiments of a very talented photographer of the Bauhaus era. Iwao Yamawaki is an interesting figure at the intersection of modernism and the history of Japanese photography. He began his career as an architect but became dissatisfied with Japanese practices. For that reason he travelled to Germany in 1930, where he enrolled as a student of the Bauhaus in Dessau. He started studying architecture at the Bauhaus, but soon moved on to the photography section where he produced architecture photography, portraits, still-lifes and photomontages. The photographic methods of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Walter Peterhans had a big influence on him. Yamawaki continuously analysed the relationship between photography and the design of spaces, and he often tried to interpret the connection between human beings and architectural space in his pictures.