Ars Camera

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Ars Camera is one of the older and longer running of Japanese camera magazines.

Although many issues are marked "Ars Camera" in roman letters, the Japanese title is simply Kamera (カメラ). It was published by a company called Ars in roman letters or アルス (Arusu) in katakana.

The first issue of Ars Camera is dated April 1921: not such an old photography magazine by Japanese standards (almost forty years younger than Shashin Shinpō) but predating Asahi Camera by five years. With a mixture of photographs, material about cameras, and contests, it set a pattern for mainstream camera magazines that has continued to the present day.[1] It managed to keep publishing despite the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, but from January 1941 was forced to merge with Shashin Salon and Camera Club to form Shashin Bunka.

Ars Camera was quick to reemerge after the war, with an issue dated January 1946. Its last issue was dated August 1956.

The September 1953 issue (¥160) has a front cover saying "ARS" in small roman letters and "camera" in much larger roman letters; its spine says アルス (Arusu) and, in larger letters, カメラ (kamera); its rear cover says "camera Published Monthly by ARS Publishing Co." (all in roman letters and without any version in Japanese script).[2] The magazine has about 175 pages, meaning that its scale is about that of Asahi Camera. As well as pages of adverts, there's an amateur contest, judged by Kimura Ihee (木村伊兵衛), whose first place is won by a photographs of children in heavy rain by Tōmatsu Teruaki (東松照明, who would later become much better known as Tōmatsu Shōmei), a double-page spread of photos taken in a beerhall by Watanabe Yoshio (渡辺義雄), an article by Ina Nobuo (伊奈信男) on trends in world photography, a discussion of photographs of men and of women between Hayashi Tadahiko (林忠彦) and Akiyama Shōtarō (秋山庄太郎), a description of how to make a stereo attachment for a Rolleiflex, a feature on how to photograph girls in kimono outside by Nakamura Rikkō (中村立行) and Kawada Kikuji (川田喜久治), and very much else.

Notes

  1. Shirayama, "Nihon no shashin/kamera zasshi".
  2. Thus it's not at all clear from even this single issue whether we should be referring to the magazine as Camera, Ars Camera, ARS Camera or something else again.

Bibliography

  • Shirayama Mari (白山眞理). "Nihon no shashin/kamera zasshi" (日本の写真・カメラ雑誌). Nihon shashin-shi gaisetsu (日本写真史概説, "An outline history of photography in Japan"). Tokyo: Iwanami, 1999. ISBN 4-00-008381-3. P.38.
  • Shirayama Mari (白山眞理). Shashin zasshi no kiseki (写真雑誌の奇跡, "Traces of camera magazines"). Tokyo: JCII Library, 2001. P.5.
  • Shirayama Mari. "Major Photography Magazines". In The History of Japanese Photography, ed. Ann Wilkes Tucker, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-300-09925-8. Pp. 378–85. P.378.

Links

In Japanese: