Manchuria through an Aesthetic Screen: Japanese Art Photography at Chicago’s A Century of Progress World’s Fair, 1933

• In Event: Japanese Empire in Motion: 1930s Art Exhibitions on the Global Stage

Abstract

In 1933, the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway Company (SMRC) sent 100 art photographs Chicago for the A Century of Progress World’s Fair. The works were the product of 26 amateur and professional photographers, all members of the Manshū Shashin Sakka Kyōkai (Manchuria Photographers Association, hereafter the MPA). The photographs were but one way the SMRC sought to mediate American perception of Japanese engagement in Manchuria, the area in Northeast China renamed “Manchukuo” by the Japanese Kwantung Army in 1932. These works drew on a variety of international artistic languages, ranging from atmospheric pictorial portraits of native inhabitants to evocative industrial landscapes reminiscent of photographs by American Margaret Bourke-White. This paper examines how the photographs established an aesthetic screen that would have lent the photographers and, by extension, the company much-needed cultural capital on the fairgrounds. More importantly, I argue that, like the Manchuria pavilion the SMRC also sponsored in Chicago that year, these photographs were meant to image a strong transcultural relationship between Japanese and American interests. However, while the pavilion focused optimistically on promoting narratives of sympathetic economic interests and parallel revolutionary histories to dispel American criticism of Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the art photographs demonstrated a shared, international language of photographic modernism. Ultimately, I question whether or not this was successful by pointing to contemporaneous American trade literature that averred such practices were insufficiently “Japanese.” In the process, I will complicate current scholarship on how work by the MPA operated as “propaganda,” particularly on the global stage.

Author

• Kari Shepherdson-Scott, Macalester College