The Japanese Photobook, 1912-1990

The Japanese Photobook, 1912-1990 is a 576-page survey of Japanese photographic book publishing, compiled from the Manfred Heiting Collection. Kaneko Ryuichi, one of the foremost historians of the Japanese photobook, edited it together with Heiting himself.

The book documents several hundred titles across nearly eight decades, from early twentieth-century amateur and Pictorialist annuals through wartime propaganda publications and postwar reconstruction-era photography. It closes with the radical are-bure-boke (grainy, blurred, out-of-focus) publications of Provoke-era photographers including Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki. Steidl published this English-language edition in 2017, extending the pair's ongoing project of documenting Japan's photobook history for a Western readership.

Kaneko, formerly a curator at the Japan Foundation and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, has been a central authority on Japanese photobook history since the 1990s. Heiting, a designer, photo-historian and collector, has built one of the most extensive private archives of Japanese and international photobooks and has co-edited numerous Steidl surveys drawing on that collection, including The Book of 101 Books.