Stepping Stones in Iris Pond-Kyotot

Three priests descend a timber staircase in the Meiji Shrine, a Shinto shrine constructed by the Japanese government between 1915 and 1920. Evenly spaced, the priests almost resemble a time-lapse image of a single figure. Werner Bischof entered Japan in 1951 while covering the Korean War as a photojournalist and was drawn to the industrialized nation’s preservation of centuries-old architectural styles. Guided by his friend, the photographer Kimura Ihei, he traveled widely to document temples and shrines; these pictures were posthumously published in a 1954 book. Bischof was not the first European to express fascination with the seemingly modern aesthetic of temple architec-ture: two decades earlier, the German architect Bruno Taut moved to Japan and published Japan Seen through European Eyes, an admiring book on the subject written in German but translated into Japanese and English.