Yoshihiro Suzuki : Eastbeats. Osaka 1964 – 1970

Yoshihiro Suzuki : Eastbeats. Osaka 1964 – 1970 – A young man who had just moved from the countryside to the metropolis of Osaka, Suzuki Yoshihiro began his new life as a factory worker with a Minolta SRI SLR camera. In his spare time, he wandered around the city, spontaneously and curiously photographing the urban landscape, in settings ranging from boulevards to shopping malls and from the business district to traditional alleyways. Suzuki defines himself as an “amateur photographer” and his story is representative of the powerful amateur photography movement in post-war Japan, which is largely unknown to the public, unlike the work of professional photographers who have been exhibited worldwide. Suzuki’s first photographs were revealed by pure coincidence: his son’s wife discovered the negatives and developed them into contact sheets. More than fifty years after Suzuki’s photographs were taken, they have finally been published in the form of a photo book.

Yoshihiro Suzuki, born in 1941 in Ashiya (Japan), began photographing around 1964. He lives in Osaka. Yumi Son, born in 1971 in Himeji (Japan), discovered the photographic archives in her father-in-law’s house in Osaka. She lives in Berlin.