Snapshot: ‘Military checkpoint’ (c1970), by Akihiko Okamura
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The Japanese photojournalist Akihiko Okamura (1929-85) became internationally known in the early 1960s when nine pages of his photographs of the Vietnam war were published in Life magazine.
In 1968 he went with his family to live in Northern Ireland, chronicling the Troubles, as well as going in search of president John F Kennedy’s ancestral roots. This image from that period, which shows women passing through a military checkpoint, is included in All About Life and Death, an exhibition of Okamura’s previously unseen work, which opens this weekend at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Okamura, who covered conflicts all over the world, cited his own “dark memory” of childhood terror in Tokyo under second world war bombing attacks as the source of his urge to tell the story of conflicts through pictures.
‘All About Life and Death’ is at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography until September 23
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