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Watanabe was an itinerant portrait photographer who worked in the Shinjuku section of Tokyo during the 1960s and 1970s, or more exactly, the blue light district of Kabukicho that was populated nightly with Yakuza (gang members), transvestites, and prostitutes. He moved to Tokyo in 1962, apprenticed for several years in a prestigious portrait studio there, and then with permission from his teacher, began to set out each night offering his services to these denizens of the night. His pictures, made with a strobe flash, were by necessity collaborative--his subjects had to be happy with their likenesses before handing over his set fee of "200 yen for three prints". Watanabe received some critical attention in the early 1970s, and published monographic surveys from then through the late 1990s, but his esteem was always most keenly felt by fellow photographers such as Daido Moriyama and Nobiyoshi Araki, who hailed him as a Japanese master. The four photographs being acquired here, from negatives made in the late 1960s but printed twenty years later, exemplify Watanabe's great talent for extracting a sense of vulnerability or at least depth beneath the bluster of their social roles.