Ihei Kimura
Plates contributed
The 1 plate attributed to Ihei Kimura in the 1955 MoMA Master Checklist (Exhibition #569).
| ID | Country | Section | Year | View |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| photo-0130 | Japan | Work | — | Clervaux |
Notes
One plate in the catalog (count verified by strict-match grep against data/photographs.csv 2026-05-10): photo-0130 (Section 14 Land, “Ihei Kimura, Japan, 20 x 14 cm”). The Master Checklist credits the plate with no agency / publication, just photographer + place + dimensions, meaning the print reached MoMA directly from the photographer rather than via an agency. “Japan” in the credit is a place-name (where the photograph was made) rather than a nationality designation; this is the convention the checklist uses for some Section 14 Land entries. Born 1901; died 1974 per src-wikipedia-kimura-pointer (in repo, fetched 2026-05-10; lead verbatim: “Ihei Kimura (12 December 1901 – 31 May 1974) was a Japanese photographer, known for his portrayal of Tokyo and Akita Prefecture”); independently corroborated at the year-level by an in-repo MoMA Master Checklist plate-note for photo-0130 (a downstream catalog-builder annotation, not the 1955 catalog itself). The 12 December 1901 / 31 May 1974 day-month tokens are corroborated by Wikidata Q3106591 (+1901-12-12 / +1974-05-31, fetched 2026-05-10 to .scratch/wikidata-kimura.json) but Wikidata and Wikipedia share the same community-editor pool and are not strictly independent. Day-level resolution remains pointer-only. ACCESS BARRIERS to non-Wikipedia institutional sources for Kimura — eleven Tier-1/2 candidates were attempted in this round and none returned an open biographical page: MoMA artist page (HTTP 403 across User-Agent variants); MoMA collection search (HTTP 403); George Eastman Museum collections (HTTP 403); SFMOMA (HTTP 403); ICP constituent archive (HTTP 200 but canonical-URL is the ICP “Page not found” template — ICP archive does not hold a Kimura entry); Tate Museum search (“No results found for ‘ihei kimura’” verbatim); Britannica search (no /biography/Kimura- entry exists); J. Paul Getty Museum search (HTTP 404); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Kimura Ihei Award page (HTTP 200 but JS-rendered, static HTML body essentially empty); Maison Européenne de la Photographie search (HTTP 200, no biographical entry); Grove Art Online (HTTP 302 → SAMS-Sigma OAuth login redirect, subscription-only). All response sizes documented in src-wikipedia-kimura-pointer. The result: outside Wikipedia, the only in-repo Tier-1/2 anchors for Kimura’s role in FoM are the MoMA Master Checklist (Tier 1) plate-level entry and the two Takenaka articles (Tier 2) which name him as Tokyo executive-committee photographer. Tokyo-Tainan-Kaō biographical narrative verbatim per src-wikipedia-kimura-pointer; the Kōga magazine 1932 / Nippon Kōbō 1933 / Chūō Kōbō group affiliations and the Shinkō shashin (“New Photography”) movement framing are also from same. Mid-1950s European trips and posthumous Kimura Ihei Award (1975+) per same. FoM curatorial-inclusion attestation verbatim per src-wikipedia-kimura-pointer (“His work was included by Edward Steichen in the world-touring 1955 MoMA exhibition The Family of Man”). The most consequential FoM-related role is the Tokyo executive committee: per src-takenaka-2020-popular-inquiry-japan p. 46 (Tier 2 in repo, verbatim): “the Japanese executive committee consisted of prominent photographers Ihee Kimura, Yoshio Watanabe, Shigene Kanemaru, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, the graphic designer Takashi Kōno who designed the catalogue, and the architect Kenzo Tange who designed the installation, et al.” Independently corroborated at Tier 2 by src-takenaka-2022-atomic-bombings (Bloomsbury chapter, search-result verbatim, in repo). Kimura’s romanization in both Takenaka sources is “Ihee Kimura” rather than the more common “Ihei Kimura”; both are accepted variant Hepburn transliterations of 木村 伊兵衛.
External biography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihei_Kimura
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