Kanbei Hanaya
Japanese photographer
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Kanbei Hanaya (ハナヤ 勘兵衛, Hanaya Kanbei; 1903–1991) was a Japanese photographer.[1][2] He was born in Osaka in 1903. In his twenties, he travelled in China and studied photography in Shanghai. In 1929, he purchased a photography supply shop in Ashiya, a city in Japan's Hyōgo Prefecture. The Ashiya Camera Club, a prominent feature of the New Photography movement, formed at the shop in 1930. Later museum accounts, including the Osaka section of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum exhibition Avant-Garde Rising: The Photographic Vanguard in Modern Japan, situated the club within the wider Kansai avant-garde and included Hanaya among the photographers represented.[3] Its membership included Iwata Nakayama, Kichinosuke Benitani, Juzo Matsubara, and Korai Seiji. The group began exhibiting in 1930 and published its first yearbook in 1931.[2]
Background
From May 1932 to December 1933, Hanaya published in the modernist journal Koga.[2][4] He helped found the Kansai Student Photography League in 1934. After World War II, he actively promoted photography in Kansai via networking and gallery promotion.[2] He was awarded a distinguished contribution award from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1986.[2]
