Eikoh Hosoe, who directed the museum from its opening until his death in September 2024, was no conventional curator. Born Toshihiro in 1933, he renamed himself Eikoh after World War II to symbolize a new Japan. He witnessed the firebombing of Tokyo as a child, studied at Tokyo College of Photography, and co-founded the Vivo collective in 1959 -- its name drawn from the Esperanto word for life, a choice that foreshadowed the museum's own guiding philosophy decades later. Hosoe's own work is dark, visceral, and psychologically charged: high-contrast black-and-white images of human bodies that probe death, erotic obsession, and irrationality. That such an artist chose to build a museum dedicated to life's affirmation is not a contradiction. It is the point. He understood that confronting darkness is itself an act of affirmation.

K*MoPA's most distinctive program is its annual Young Portfolio exhibition, which invites emerging photographers from around the world to submit their work for the museum's permanent collection. The idea grew from one of the gallery's earliest exhibitions: a show in which twenty-five well-established Japanese photographers displayed work they had created in their twenties, a retrospective exercise that revealed how raw ambition and unpolished instinct often produced an artist's most arresting images. The Young Portfolio turns that insight into practice, actively acquiring prints of archival quality from photographers still building their careers. For many young artists, having work accepted into K*MoPA's collection represents their first institutional recognition -- a signal that their vision has weight.

Alongside its commitment to emerging talent, K*MoPA has hosted solo retrospectives of internationally celebrated photographers. Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the Mexican master whose poetic images of people and landscapes made him one of the twentieth century's most important photographers, has been exhibited here. So has Shisei Kuwabara, known for his intimate documentation of Japanese daily life. The exhibitions tend toward the thematic rather than chronological, organized around ideas -- memory, landscape, the body, conflict -- rather than career timelines. Exhibition catalogs are produced for each show and available directly from the museum, building a paper archive that parallels the photographic one on the walls.

The museum's location is no accident. Kiyosato sits on a highland plateau at the southern foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains, an area known for its clean air, deep forests, and expansive views. The nearest train stop is Kiyosato Station on the JR Koumi Line, one of the highest railway lines in Japan, which threads through the mountains connecting Nagano and Yamanashi prefectures. Arriving here requires intention -- this is not a museum you stumble into on a city sidewalk. The journey up from the lowlands, through switchbacks and tunnels and thickening forest, prepares visitors for the kind of slow, focused attention that photography rewards. Inside the gallery, the highland light filters through carefully designed spaces, and the quiet of the plateau seeps in through the walls. It is a place built for looking -- really looking -- at images that insist life is worth the effort.