In 1957 an exhibit featuring the work of ten new Japanese photographers, Eyes of Ten, opened in Tokyo. The photographers featured in this show rejected the impersonal humanism of The Family of Man for a more expressive—and often more unsettling, way of documenting the world. There were two more Eyes of Ten exhibits in the following two years and in July, 1959 six of these photographers formed the VIVO cooperative: Shōmei Tōmatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, Akira Satō and Akira Tanno. While these six photographers shared an office and darkroom in Tokyo, they were not working on a collective project. They were pursuing their own visions and attempting to distribute their work without agents.

1. Jidai o hiraita shashinkatachi : 1960-70-nendai (Photographers Who Created a New Age: 1960s-70s). Tokyo: Tōkyō-to Bunka Shinkōkai: Tōkyō-to Shashin Bijutsukan, 1993, p.122-123.
2. Kikuji Kawada. The Map = Chizu. Tucson, Arizona, Nazraeli Press, 2005, [p.15-16 (inside fold)].
3. Ikkō Narahara. Ikko Narahara, Japanesque. Milano: F. Motta, 1994, p.7-8.
4. Anne Wilkes Tucker, et al. The History of Japanese Photography. New Haven: Yale University Press; Houston: in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, 2003, p.236-237.