This dissertation analyzes photographic practices in Tokyo, Kobe, Kyoto, Yokohama, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, paradoxically illustrating the materiality of photographed objects through images presumed to be immaterial. I examine how photography was used to investigate the material operation of busshitsu––the Japanese term meaning “matter” in English. Busshitsu was examined in the artistic discourse developed between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s in Japan as the external material reality of things that unsettled modernist anthropocentrism. The dissertation analyzes the international emergence of conceptual photography, which illustrates the medium’s potential to produce ontological shifts by breaking down the hierarchy of relationships in the world and liberating artists from the limitations of their eyes, preconceptions, and languages that impose fixed meanings on the material environment. By investigating the visual and conceptual parallels between the less-studied photographic practices of Japanese artists, such as Takamatsu Jirō, Kinoshita Kazuyo, and Nomura Hitoshi, and American artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Jay DeFeo, and Judy Chicago, the dissertation aims to expand the scope of the study of the history of contemporary photography and shift the focus from the center-versus-periphery paradigm to the mapping of multiple localities. I contend that their works challenged the image-saturated world that embodied the domination of the American hegemonic-capitalist order that followed the Second World War. Ironically, this was accomplished through photography, the same medium that created that world.