Shinkō shashin

Shinkō shashin (新興写真; also romanized Shinko shashin; lit. "new" or "emerging photography") was a modernist current in Japanese photography that emerged in the late 1920s and became especially prominent around 1930, as photographers turned away from pictorialism and toward forms of expression seen as specific to the photographic medium. Influenced in particular by Germany's Neue Sachlichkeit and by Neues Sehen and related modernist ideas, it emphasized the camera and lens as mechanical tools and pursued sharp, objective-looking images as well as new visual procedures distinct from painterly "art photography".

A widely cited catalyst was the 1931 touring exhibition in Japan of the photographic component of Film und Foto (Film und Foto), which gave many photographers their first sustained encounter with large-scale international modern photography in original prints; the photographer Ihei Kimura later characterized its impact as marking "the border between the old and the new" in Japanese photography. In later museum and scholarly histories, shinkō shashin is therefore often used as a compact label for Japan's interwar photographic modernism: a heterogeneous field that ranged from "straight" description and emerging documentary/photojournalistic practice to avant-garde experiment including photograms, photomontage, and Surrealist-inflected work.

Late-1930s debates also used the label zen'ei shashin ("avant-garde photography"), which should be distinguished from shinkō shashin as a broader label for interwar photographic modernism; in English-language scholarship, this late-1930s "zen'ei" moment is often discussed within overviews of avant-garde photography in Japan, and Stojkovic notes that discussion of the term included efforts to redefine "avant-garde" in ways that reduced its political charge.