An amateur photographer’s portrait of postwar Osaka, published for the first time

As a young man who had just moved from the countryside to the metropolis of Osaka, Yoshihiro Suzuki (born 1941) started a new life as a company worker by treating himself to a Minolta SRI single-lens reflex camera. In his free time, he wandered around the city, spontaneously and curiously photographing the urban landscape, from boulevards to shopping arcades and from the business district to traditional backstreets. Suzuki refers to himself as an amateur photographer, and his story is representative of the strong amateur photography movement in postwar Japan, which is for the most part unknown to the public. Suzuki’s early photographs came to light by pure coincidence: his son’s wife discovered the negatives and developed them as contact sheets. More than 50 years after Suzuki’s photographs were taken, they are finally published as a photobook.