Tōru Kōno

was a Japanese photographer. He was born on August 29 in Tenoji district in Osaka City, Japan.

He graduated the Yao City Public Secondary School in 1927. It was around that time that he started to take landscape and still-life photographs.

There was an underlying sense of solidarity, evident through joint photographic production projects, amongst photographers in the various photo clubs sprouting up around the country at this time. One such example of such collaboration was when six photographers of the Tampei Photography Club came together in 1941 to photograph Jewish refugees who had escaped to Kobe from Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe. Many of these refugees who were photographed were given visas out of Lithuania by Chiuna Sugihara. The project was titled The Wandering Jews and was published at the 23rd exhibition of the Tampei Photography Club. Kōno's interwar work was later revisited in the Osaka section of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum exhibition Avant-Garde Rising: The Photographic Vanguard in Modern Japan, which included him among the photographers representing the Kansai avant-garde. It was headed by Yasui Nakaji; other members included Kono, Kametaro Kawasaki, Tabuchi Kaneyoshi, Yutaka Tezuka, and Osamu Shiihara.

Democratic Artists Association In 1951, Kōno participates in the formation of the Democratic Artists Association with Ei-Q. Other members at the time included Kei Mori, Shigeru Izumi, Yoshio Hayakawa, Shisui Tanahashi, Toshiji Yoshida, Morio Gunji, Kohei Uchida, and Hisashi Toyama. Kōno and Tanahashi exhibited their works at the First Democratic Art Exhibition in Osaka in June 1951. A few months later the Second Democratic Art Exhibition in Osaka was held in August of the same year. In March 1952 the organization held their first exhibition in Tokyo, titled First Democratic Art Exhibition in Tokyo.

In 1952, Kōno participated in an exhibition with other Tampei Photography Club members in Matsushima Gallery on the second floor of the Ginza Matsushima Eyeglass Store. The Eight Person Tampei Exhibition included Shisui Tanahashi, Takeji Iwamiya, Katsumasa Kimura, Gyokai Sahoyama, Hatsutaro Horiuchi, Ikko Wada, and Mizuo Tamai.

Spiegel Photographers Association But in the same year, after 21 years, he quits the Tampei Photography Club and leaves the Democratic Art's Association a year later in 1953. In the same year, he creates a new organization called the Spiegel Photography Association with Shisui Tanahashi and Katsumasa Kimura. He also establishes Kono Studio in Osaka City. He died on April 19, 1984. and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum