Even as a teenager, when I received pictures from a Japanese pen pal of her school trip to Kyoto City, looking at the photographs of gently curving temple roofs and pagodas gave me a deep feeling, a hitherto unknown longing to visit this ancient, venerable imperial city with its architectural aesthetics one day. After completing my business studies, I travelled to the land of my longing for the first time in the 1980s – and how could it have been otherwise, a planned short stay in Kyoto turned into several years. I decided to study the country in depth, immersed myself in Japanese society, learnt the language and years later took up a degree in Japanese Studies.
Hartmut Pohling
Finally founded the Japan-Photo-Archiv, a collection of self-photographed images on Japanese culture, history and society, a rather rare specialisation at the time, which therefore brought me quite a few enquiries from publishers and picture editors. However, with the introduction of digital photography, there were suddenly a lot of people who wanted to join in. Nevertheless, the archive was not only maintained, but also expanded and gradually adapted to current technical and organisational requirements. Today, the Japan-Photo-Archiv contains almost 250,000 images, of which around 20,000 are available for viewing on the website.