Nichigai Associates

Bigger, newer, heavier, more expensive than Nihon shashinka jiten, this has a lot more photographers. Like Nihon shashinka jiten, it was edited by staff of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. All the photographers were born before 1930, which is perhaps a way to encourage people to buy the rather later reference book of contemporary photographers (even more expensive, and not interesting). It seems that Nichigai has an enormous bibliographic database, or anyway the biographical entries in this book come excellent (although in no way descriptive) bibliographies; however, the bibliographies tend to dwarf the biographical information, which tends to be sparse and is sometimes taken fairly directly from Nihon shashinka jiten. There's very little description of the photographs themselves. All in all a rather arid reference book that will be of great use to rather few people. Note that despite the alternative title in English, the entire book is in Japanese alone.… (mehr)