Memories of Bob Kirschenbaum

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From 1978 until the end of 1985, I worked as a staff member at Pacific Press Service (PPS). Those years were filled with the relentless pace of editing, coordinating, and communicating, but being at the crossroads where Japan and the world connected through photography became an invaluable foundation for my later career as a photographer.

At the heart of those years stood Bob Kirschenbaum, PPS’s founder and president. Born in New York in 1936, Bob belonged to a generation that saw journalism and photography as a “language of truth.” With a cigar often in hand, he would punctuate long silences with remarks that were sharp, sometimes severe, but always carried a quiet warmth.

One of his favorite sayings has stayed with me:

“The photography world is small, but the Japanese photography world is distant.”
Photographers around the globe formed a tight-knit circle where everyone seemed to know one another, yet from that vantage point, Japan felt oddly remote—its photography community was insular, difficult to access from outside. Bob’s observation struck me as perfectly accurate, though I didn’t yet realize how deeply I would come to feel that “distance” myself.

I experienced it most vividly in 1985, during the ambitious international project “A Day in the Life of Japan.” On June 7th, one hundred photographers—eighty from around the world and twenty from Japan—spread out across the country to document a single day, culminating in a book of the same title. I served as coordination editor, tasked with bridging the gap between world-renowned foreign photographers and the realities of shooting in Japan.

It was through this role that Bob’s words truly came alive for me. The international photographers brought perspectives and demands that were unfamiliar, even challenging, to Japan’s photography scene at the time. Cultural and professional differences surfaced at every turn. My work became less about logistics and more about closing that gap, connecting two photographic worlds that seemed so near in spirit yet far apart in practice.

When Bob passed away in 2023, I found myself hearing his voice once again:

“The photography world is small, but the Japanese photography world is distant.”
That sense of distance I felt during that massive project still lingers, but so does the determination to bridge it—a lesson and a gift I owe to him.