PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

1. Exhibitions: The museum holds exhibitions throughout the year in its three galleries. Each offers about 500 square meters of exhibition space used for a wide variety of events, including exhibitions and screenings introducing the approximately 33,000 photographs and other visual media in the museum’s collection, special exhibitions planned by the museum and carried out with the support of its sustaining members, and joint exhibitions planned with other organizations.
2. Education and Outreach: The museum’s educational and outreach programs include lectures, talk events, workshops (including photography and video workshops, and workshops for children), a school program for elementary, middle, and high schools, guided tours, and a museum volunteer program.
3. Collecting: The museum selects and conserves photographs, other visual media, reference materials, photographic equipment, and related materials, according to defined principles and goals. It also provides access for viewing items in the collection.
4. Research: The museum carries out research from an international perspective, building on achievements in the history of photography and visual media, art history, photographic theory, visual media theory, and art theory in Japan and overseas. In doing so, its focus is always on new trends in photography and work in other visual media. Its research results inform its exhibitions, education and outreach programs, publications, and symposia.
5. Public Relations: The museum carries out public relations and advertising activities, particularly concerning its exhibitions and outreach programs, to popularize the culture of photography and other visual media through tools such as holding press conferences, publishing a museum newsletter, distributing flyers, maintaining a website, planning and implementing public relations events, and displaying posters, exterior wall sheets, and banners.
6. Information System: The museum maintains a database that covers collecting, recording, managing,and utilizing its collection and its library. Visitors may use the database.
7. Image Permanence Laboratory: The museum studies the condition of works in the collection before and after they are displayed or lent, determines conditions for storage and display, conserves works in the collection, conducts environmental studies in the galleries, and carries out research on the preservation and conservation of photographic materials.
8. Library: The library collects, organizes, and stores books and other documents,makes them available in its reading room, offers reference services, and provides support for research.
9. Lab Theater: The museum screens films and other outstanding works by promising young directors in its first-floor theater, in accordance with its mission.
10. Corporate Membership: The museum has established a corporate sustaining member program to promote photographic and visual media culture and arts and to support the activities of the museum; the membership system enables the museum to carry out a fuller and more varied set of programs.