Mother and child, 1988

Kazuo Kitai  

Kazuo Kitai, born in Manchuria in 1944, dropped out six months into his first year of art school—an early sign of the rebellious spirit that would lead him to the protest movements of 1960s Japan. His first photography book, Resistance, was self-published in 1965. Throughout the rest of the decade, he continued to follow radical student protests, producing Barricade, Agitators, and finally Sanrizuka in 1971.
As the 1960s came to a close, Kitai grew disillusioned with political themes and turned his attention to the everyday lives of ordinary people. His first journey took him to one of Japan's most remote regions, Shimokita. In 1972 and 1973, he returned to the far north of Honshu, traveling through the neighboring area of Tsugaru.
Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Kitai continued his exploration of rural Japan—a body of work that earned him the inaugural Ihei Kimura Prize in 1976, the country's most prestigious photography award.
Mother and Child (printed in 1988) belongs to this iconic period in his career, marked by a meticulous and moving documentation of a vanishing rural way of life.