Bishin Jumonji

Front cover of Jūmonji Bishin no shigoto to shūhen, incorporating a photograph of the middle-aged Jumonji, and, in the place of his face, a headless photograph taken by Jumonji in 1971/2. is a Japanese photographer known for advertising, portrait, and architectural work.

Jumonji was born in Yokohama on 4 March 1947. After studying at the Tokyo College of Photography he worked as an assistant to Kishin Shinoyama and went freelance in 1971, working as the photographer for advertisements for Matsushita Electric and Shiseido products.

The association with Matsushita would later bring awards from the Art Directors Club every year from 1975 to 1979. Jumonji has continued to do editorial and commercial work (notably for Hayashibara Biochemical Laboratories).

In 1972, with nine other photographers, he participated in an exhibition of portraits of Simon Yotsuya at the Kinokuniya Gallery in Shinjuku.

Jumonji had started taking his "Untitled" series of portraits of people framed to exclude their heads in 1971. In 1972, these appeared in the magazine Camera Mainichi and were shown in the Neikrug gallery in New York; a year later they were included in "New Japanese Photography", at the New York MoMA.

Up to 1980, Jumonji made nineteen trips to Hawaii, photographing the islands and photographing and interviewing elderly first-generation Japanese immigrants. The series juxtaposes photographs of Hawaiʻi and black-and-white portraits of the people living there. Installments were published in Camera Mainichi in 1979 and the set was exhibited in 1980, when it won the Ina Nobuo Award. It was published, as Orchid Boat, in 1981.

Jumonji's second published collection was Kéntauros, a large-format booklet of black-and-white photographs of the members of the motorbike organization Kéntauros striking poses with switchblades and other props.

In 1981, Jumonji went to Indochina to photograph the religious customs of the Yao people. In 1983–84 he visited Thailand, Burma and Laos. The result was published as Sumitōtta yami in 1987.

Jumonji had started photographing gold works of art in 1981. The first exhibition of the results was in Matsuya department store (Ginza), in 1987. This work culminated in the book Ōgon fūtenjin, published in 1990. This won the Domon Ken Award the following year. Some of these works would also be shown in two of a set of four volumes of stereoscopes, all photographed by Jumonji and published in 1993–4.

Jumonji started photographing architecture and gardens in 1988, and the Katsura Detached Palace in particular in 1991.

Jumonji photographed Matsumoto Kōshirō IX for a collection of black-and-white portraits; in 2005 he published a second volume, Nippon Geki-gan, of monochrome portraits of actors taken with a large-format camera shortly before or after performance.

In 1998, Jumonji started work on Wabi, his attempt to depict (in color) the Japanese aesthetic ideal of wabi. The project started with cha-no-yu but branched out into everyday scenes.

Jumonji exhibited composite photographs of four Japanese waterfalls at the Shiseido Gallery (Ginza) in June and July 2004.

Jumonji's photographs have appeared in Zoom and Stern.