New Delhi [India], September 3 (ANI): The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi will showcase nearly 100 years of Tokyo’s history through photographs as the exhibition ‘Tokyo Before/After’ opened at the gallery on Thursday.
The exhibition, titled ‘Tokyo Before/After’, brings together around 80 photographs from two different periods of the Japanese capital’s history. Organised in collaboration with the Japan Foundation, the exhibition began on September 3.
The photographs take visitors from Tokyo of the 1930s and 1940s to the city captured by photographers from the 2010s onwards. The collection shows changes in the city’s streets, buildings and people, while also looking at parts of everyday life and cultural memory that have remained over the years.
Works by well-known Japanese photographers, including Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, are part of the exhibition.
Sanjeev Kishor Goutam, Director General of NGMA, spoke about the way the exhibition connects Tokyo’s past with its present. He said, “A city is never only what we see before us. It is also what it remembers. Tokyo Before/After allows us to encounter the dynamic city of Tokyo through two distinct moments in time and to discover through photography the subtle continuities between memory, transformation and human experience.”
The exhibition also brings together photographs taken before and after major changes in Tokyo, allowing visitors to see how different generations viewed the same city at different points in time.
Koji Sato, Director General of The Japan Foundation, New Delhi, spoke about how photography can record the changes a city goes through. He said, “Photography offers a unique way of understanding a city. Beyond recording streets, buildings, or people, it preserves moments of transformation and reveals how different generations have perceived the same place over time,”
The exhibition was first produced for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Its New Delhi edition also marks the first Japan Foundation Travelling Exhibition to be held at NGMA.
The opening ceremony for the exhibition was held at NGMA on September 2. Jinichi Kadowaki, Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of Japan in India, and Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, were among those present.
The exhibition, which began on September 3, will conclude on September 19. (ANI)