1915 Born in Tokyo

1933 Joins Oriental Photographic Industries and trains in aerial photography.

1939 Meets ethnologist Keizo Shibusawa and is strongly influenced by his positivist documentary spirit. Becomes interested in ancient rituals, farming practices and rites of daily rural life in Japan.

1940 Begins the Yukiguni (Snow Land) series focusing on the farming practices and daily life in the remote mountains of Niigata prefecture.

1954 Begins work on his Ura Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast) series.

1955 Work included in Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1960 Becomes the first Asian photographer to work for Magnum. Covered the demonstrations against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, personally adopting an anti-government stance. He is left disillusioned by this episode and decides to return to aerial photography to begin the Landscapes of Japan and international Aspects of Nature series.

1986 Receives the Master of Photography Award from New York’s International Center of Photography (ICP) accompanied by a major retrospective.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

1955 Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1986 Hamaya Hiroshi: Master of Photography, International Center of Photography, New York.

1989 Hamaya Hiroshi, Photographer, Kawasaki City Museum.

1997 Hamaya Hiroshi, Sixty-six years of photography, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.