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LADIES STROLLING, SENDAI, 1950 KEN DOMON

In his lifetime the Japanese photographer Ken Domon took somewhere in the region of 70,000 photographs. He photographed children and artists, riots and temples. From the 1930s to the 1970s he was a mainstay of Japanese photography, moving from taking propagandist imagery before the war to capturing the story of Japan in the years after it.

And so in his images you can see both victory parades in Shanghai in 1937 and reconstructive surgery to the surviving victims of the Hiroshima atom bomb, images now gathered together in a new book, Domon Ken.

Born in 1909, the son of a nurse and an office worker, Domon came to photography after failing to make it as a painter. It was quickly clear he had a cool, clear eye for the photographic image. At his peak in the 1950s he was one of Japan’s leading proponents of “social-realist photography”.

In 1959 he suffered the first of three hugely debilitating brain haemorrhages, though he was still taking photographs in 1979 while in a wheelchair and needing help from assistants.

He died in 1990, still relatively unknown in the west. An exhibition of his work in Italy last year was the first time his photographs had been shown outside Japan. Now a new book is bringing his work to a wider audience. “Taking pictures was the way that Domon expressed himself,” his former assistant, Takeshi Fujimori, writes in Domon Ken. “For him, taking pictures meant being alive.”

Domon Ken, by Rosella Menegazzo, Takeshi Fujimori and Yuki Seli is published by Skira Editore, priced £29.95