Masao Gozu: Windows and Bars at MoMA PS1

MoMA PS1 in Long Island City opened Windows and Bars on November 5, the first US museum exhibition devoted to Masao Gozu (b. 1946, Nagano Prefecture, Japan). It runs through March 15, 2027. The show gathers a focused selection of photographs from the 1970s to the present, centered on two bodies of work: the Windows series and the Harry's Bar series.

Gozu graduated from the Toyo Arts School in 1970 and moved to New York in 1971 on the Max Beckmann scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he studied until 1973. Walking the city, he began photographing people through the windows of tenement buildings, from Bay Ridge to Little Italy. The series treats the window as a kind of proscenium, a frame through which everyday life plays out like theater. His subjects rarely look back at the camera. They gaze at something happening outside the picture, which leaves them ambiguous figures and invites the viewer to imagine the scene.

Gozu kept working on the series until 2004 and made thousands of images. More recently he has gone back to the same locations to photograph them again. The results record sharp changes in the city's built landscape and, in some places, a surprising continuity. One pairing on view shows Mott Street in Chinatown: a gelatin silver print from May 1972 beside a digital photograph from March 2025, each 20 by 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm).

Gozu is a photographer and sculptor based in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Toyoshina Modern Art Museum in Azumino; OK Harris and Howl Art Gallery in New York; Galerie Pons in Paris; and Grand Central Terminal, among others. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Centre Pompidou; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Margulies Collection; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He received the 10th Nobuo Ina Prize in 1985 and the special jury prize at Mois de la photo 90 in Paris in 1990.

The exhibition is organized by Jody Graf, Associate Curator. On November 7, the museum holds an Open House and a workshop tied to the show, "Looking Out / Looking In." Admission is free.