Hiroji Kubota sounds a little over-the-top when he insists his “life is meaningless” without photography. But a glance at his latest — and 19th — book will convince you he is absolutely right, given how his life has been intertwined with some of Magnum’s legendary photographers, like René Burri, Burt Glinn and my father, Elliott Erwitt. He started out working with some of them as a fixer and translator, even though he refused payment at first. “I was brought up comfortably and didn’t need it,” he said.
He did, however, accept a beat-up Leica M3 from Burri. His life changed when he got a first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment” a month later. “When I opened it, I said, ‘My gosh, what is this?’ ” he recalled. “That motivated me. That’s when I became serious.” His fate was sealed when Burri showed him a Swiss magazine that featured his Gaucho pictures. “It shocked me like crazy,” he said. “I knew then I wanted to be a photographer.”
The results of those personally decisive moments are evident in Aperture’s “Hiroji Kubota Photographer,” a retrospective covering 50 years of his work. I met Hiroji almost that long ago, because my father, Elliott Erwitt, sponsored him when he first came to America, even picking him up at the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. They had met when Hiroji worked as a fixer on one of my father’s early trips to Japan, in 1962, to illustrate Robert Donovan’s book “PT 109,” about John F. Kennedy’s World War II exploits. Hiroji was my father’s translator when he photographed the captain and crew of the destroyer that famously cut Kennedy’s boat in two.
That kind of work led to his meeting other influential photographers who would encourage him, eventually bringing him to New York, where he became a familiar figure at the Magnum offices. Back then, the agency was a small, international and slightly dysfunctional family that was accessible if you met the right people, which he did.
Cornell Capa, a Magnum photographer, “adopted me literally, not legally,” he said. “He had no children, so he needed a son, a fairly well-behaved son who could cook for him.” Capa, who entertained “big shots” at his Fifth Avenue apartment, helped Hiroji make a few extra dollars by having him cook. Burt Glinn also hired Hiroji as an assistant to help him get by. Hiroji showed similar ingenuity when he spent the better part of a year photographing in Chicago, where he ran an ad hoc Japanese catering business every other weekend to help pay the bills. By 1967, he was a successful photographer firmly ensconced at Magnum, and it was time to return to Japan.
He has proved to be a remarkably tenacious photographer who immerses himself in a story and returns to it until he is satisfied. He has managed to get to places others can’t — like his unlimited access on many trips to China, when travel within the country was still limited. He would talk government officials into allowing him the time and access he needed to achieve his purpose. Same with North Korea; he has made countless visits — at its invitation — at a time when it was essentially a closed country.
While I had been aware of his color work, the big surprise for me is his black-and-white images, which have not been published often. These little-known images are a great historical document of a time in America that is also a part of my adolescence: from civil rights marches and draft card burnings to the Black Panthers and the hippies. I was lucky enough to see a lot of this work as proof prints as Hiroji was gearing up for the book’s production.
His work from North Korea is singular as well, as he was there when nobody else could go, shining a light on a closed society. He will return soon and, we can hope, get permission to photograph the son of Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un.
And not to be forgotten is his work from his beloved Japan, which includes beautifully composed landscapes and other scenic images.
As impressive as all of this is, Hiroji kind of shrugs it off.
“I’m just a photographer,” he said. “I don’t know, I just push the button. I never worked in the darkroom, I never studied journalism; to me, I’m just a photographer.”
An exhibition accompanying the publication of “Hiroji Kubota Photographer” opens in New York on Nov. 18 at the Aperture Gallery, 547 West 27th Street.
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