KW245 (47)

While working in a Tokyo portrait studio, Katsumi Watanabe began frequenting Shinjuku, an entertainment and red-light district that was a crucible of individual and collective revolt in the years around 1970. He left his job in 1967 to pursue street photography full time, selling portraits to his subjects for modest prices. The woman in this photograph could belong to a variety of groups Watanabe encountered and befriended, including prostitutes, transvestites, vagrants, gang members, nightclub workers, and bar patrons. Over the years he became thoroughly integrated into the Shinjuku underground, and Watanabe left his subjects free to pose according to their personality, emphasizing frequent ambiguities in gender, sexual orientation, occupation, age, and economic status. Eventually Watanabe’s Shinjuku photographs attracted the attention of leading Japanese photographers Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, and others. Tomatsu secured a portfolio for Watanabe in a photography journal in the early 1970s, and this led to exhibitions and other “above-ground” projects.