Europe in the 1970s, photographed in panoramic proportions

When Japanese photography legend Chotoku Tanaka visited Europe in the 1970s, he acquired a “Horizont”, a panoramic camera made in the Soviet Union, in East Berlin and used it during the rest of his long trip that took him to Paris, West and East Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Vienna, Venice, Amsterdam, Prague and other cities. A brilliant street photographer, Tanaka’s photographs take on a strange new quality in the new format, and despite the pronounced everyday-ness and unaffectedness of his scenes, the realism of the photos is tinged with a hint of the surreal.

“It is not easy to analyze and explain the appeal of panoramic photographs. The one important thing about panoramic photography concerns photography’s artistic point of cutting out the real world: from the outset, panoramic photography does not care about camera angles and so forth.” –– from Chotoku Tanaka’s statement (translation by shashasha)

-Book Size
189 × 267 mm
-Pages
108 pages, 86 images
-Binding
Hardcover
-Publication Year
2020
-Language
English, Japanese
-Limited Edition750
-ISBN
978-4-905453-90-1

Artist Profile

Chotoku Tanaka

Born in Tokyo, 1947, Tanaka graduated from Nihon University College of Art, specializing in photography. While he was still in school, he had already been publishing his works in magazines and exhibiting at galleries, and after graduating he stayed in Vienna, New York and Prague to work as a photographer. Tanaka has a reputation for his deep knowledge of cameras and photography — he is still writing for many specialized magazines and his own web magazine “Chotoku’s Camera Notes”. His main publications include “Vienna, New York, Niigata” (1991, Broadcasting System of Niigata), “Wien Monochrome 70’s” (2005, Tokyo Kirara), “Panoramic Photography Europe 1975” (2020, Zen Foto Gallery) and many more.

Gallery Exhibitions