Shigeo Anzai

was a Japanese photographer. A self-professed "art documentarist", Anzai is well-known for his prolific photographic documentation of artworks, exhibitions, and events of his time. He is also known for intimate portraits of popular modern and contemporary artists, which cast their subjects in an unexpected, unposed, and humanizing light. As Anzai noted for Artforum, he was interested in the "humanity" of his subjects, or the human being within the artist, rather than the artist within the human being. Anzai's style of portraiture stands in contrast to the popular modes of portrait photography of the time which monumentalized their subjects, as in the work of Hans Namuth.

Early life and professional activity Shigeo Anzai was born in 1939 in the city of Atsugi in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. During this time, he taught himself painting and drawing. If it were not for the darkly-etched border around the frame with the sprockets of film showing at the lower edge of the image, the white of the wall and the whites of the cotton fibers would risk being lost in this ambiguous gray composition. Just after taking photographs of Lee's work at Tamura Gallery, for example, the two of them went to a nearby soba noodle shop.

During this time, Anzai started taking photographs but also continued painting. It was the intense conversations he had with Lee, Sekine Nobuo, Yoshida Katsurō and others that would inspire him to devote himself to photographing the camera instead of canvas. In 1978, Anzai received a J.D. Rockefeller III Fund Foundation Fellowship to live in New York for a year. While there, he photographed performances at The Kitchen, documented the contemporary art scene in New York thoroughly with his camera, and started to establish relationships with Bill Viola, Laurie Anderson, and other emerging artists of the time. Since the 1970s, Anzai's practice centered on documenting the contemporary art scene with his camera. Rather than documenting static objects like painting and sculpture, however, Anzai's photographs focus especially on ephemeral moments, such as events and performances in galleries and parks, or the time-based, temporary works of artists like Lee Ufan and Kishio Suga of the Mono-ha movement.

Anzai's practice, apart from its documentary moments, also features works that complicate the photograph as object record. This occurs, for example, in works in which Anzai inserts himself, such as in an image of Lee Ufan installing his work Relatum at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, (1970). His hand-written notations are made with a black pen on the white border, giving the photographs the feeling of a unique hand drawing. This is largely considered Anzai's most monumental project, as a documentarian of the epoch-making exhibition. In 2007, the National Art Center Tokyo held a solo exhibition titled Personal Photo Archives, featuring around 3,000 of Anzai's photographs over 37 years. The exhibition title, chosen by Anzai himself, embodied the ethos of his work: an archive of the development of modern art, photographed from a highly-personal viewpoint built on close relationships with artists.

The exhibition featured Anzai's Freeze series in complete form in its totality of 100 works, as a later series. The series features the enlarged faces of Japanese artists at 1.25 meter by 1.0 meter, capturing a "frozen" moment as the series title indicates.