Irie Taikichi Memorial Nara City Museum of Photography
Concrete museum built to house one photographer's entire donated archive of eighty thousand temple and Buddhist-statue images.
This guide to the Irie Taikichi Memorial Nara City Museum of Photography opens with a question: how does a man who spent his career pricing film and camera gear end up giving away his life's work? It traces Irie Taikichi from his commercial studio Kogeisha, opened in Osaka in 1931, through the March 1945 air raid that burned his shop and home and sent him back to Nara, to the photo books that made him commercially successful starting in 1958. The concrete building around you, sunk partly below ground, was designed decades later by architect Kisho Kurokawa for what came next.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.