This is the work of Japanese photographer Yoshiyuki Iwase (1904-2001). Yoshiyuki was born in in Onjuku, a fishing village on the pacific side of the Chiba peninsula, near Tokyo Bay. He spent his career photographing the ama free divers, women who fished along the coast.
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Yoshiyuki studied law at Meiji University & graduated in 1924. He was heir to the family sake distillery, but was determined to document the receding traditions of the coastal Japan where he grew up.
In the late 1920s, Yoshiyuki received a Kodak camera as a gift and he started to photograph the girls and women who harvested seaweed, turban shells, oysters, pearls and abalone from along the coastline.
The women free dived in the sea, often nude or semi nude, as their foremothers had done for centuries before them. Yoshiyuki’s photographs are the most comprehensive record of how the those ama divers lived & worked.
Most of his work on the ama divers was taken in the 1950s. He had many solo exhibitions in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan. His photographs are now held in collections in both Tokyo and Onjuku historical museums.
As his work progressed, he began experimenting with posed nude photographs inspired by his early work with the ama. The shots are more stylised, but he often used ama divers as his models.
yoshiyuki-iwase.blogspot.com/p/in-1904-yosh…
yoshiyuki-iwase.blogspot.com/p/in-1904-yosh…
