Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

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Entrance to the museum

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (東京都写真美術館, Tōkyō Shashin Bijutsukan) is a photography gallery (with cinema) in Meguro-ku, a short walk from Ebisu station in southwest Tokyo. There is an entrance charge.

On its opening in 1990, this was one of the first photography galleries in Japan not to be dedicated to the works of a single photographer. Most of the exhibitions since then have been themed rather than devoted to a single photographer, but retrospective shows have been dedicated to Berenice Abbott (1990) and Tadahiko Hayashi (1993–4).

In order to appeal to children as well as adults, the gallery holds exhibitions of anime and video games.

The library of the gallery has a substantial collection of books of photographs.

The museum now (2006) also labels itself "Syabi", pronounced shabi.^[1]

[edit] Notes

^ Perhaps motivated in part by the search for a short, unclaimed domain name, this neologism is derived from shashin+bijutsu and means "photo-art". That the Japanese is romanized in Kunrei-shiki or Nihon-shiki rather than the Hepburn style explains the difference between "sy" and "sh" — the difference is merely orthographic and is unrelated to pronunciation.