Photographic trends in Japan during the Heisei Era have been multiple and complex. However, despite the sheer number of artists and produced works, the surveys to date have tended to emphasize certain narratives related to just a handful of well-known photographers. Established figures in the industry, along with critics, have dominated the academic discourse leaving the significance of innumerable other artists vastly underexplored.

This paper will focus on photographic representations of alienation and ahistoricism in Japanese photography during the first two decades of the Heisei Era. I will discuss the sense of historical forgetfulness that permeated Japan at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. My aim is to interrogate images made by art photographers such as Imai Tomoki, Sasaoka Keiko, and Sanai Masafumi in order to untangle views of social and affective space. As Yoneyama (1998) points out, the reality of postwar in late modernity was characterized by a sense of history that tends to dissipate, “even when the desires of the real and the original are intensified”. In the same light, critic Sawaragi Noi claims that the Japan of the 1990s was “enclosed in a vicious circle of ahistoricism” (Sawaragi 1998).

I will argue that these processes are imbricated in the cultural representations of late 20th century capitalism and its logic, where Japan struggles with the sense of alienation brought about by hyper consumerism, phantasmatic urban spaces, and the dialectic between a forgotten/imagined past and a visual search punctuated by the affective dimension of desire.