Since the 1970s, Japanese photography has become the subject of major books and international exhibitions, but recognition has primarily centred on male photographers such as SUGIMOTO Hiroshi, MORIYAMA Daidō and ARAKI Nobuyoshi.
- Introduction to I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, Aperture, 2024
Until recently, the work of women photographers in Japan had been overlooked or, in some cases, dismissed. For example, the controversial moniker ‘girly photo’ (onnnanoko shashin), coined by male critics and the wider media, was a way of labelling the work produced by a group of women artists during the 1990s.
This one-day event reflects on the cultural, historical and political circumstances that led to a creative output of photographers making work in the 1990s and beyond. Their work continues to shape subsequent generations of artists. It also highlights the infrastructure and support that was available at that time.
Three artists from the Japanese Women Photographers exhibitions in London and Tokyo – AWANE Ai, NAGASHIMA Yurie and NAHARASHI Asako – speak about their practice. Each will also take part in a moderated discussion about their work in relation to the attitudes toward, and achievements of, women photographers in Japan. Writer, critic and photography curator TAKEUCHI Mariko looks at the wider conditions for women in Japan in her keynote talk.
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Speaker biographies
AWANE Ai
IWANE Ai is a photographer who studied in the United States at Petrolia High School (1991), an alternative school located in Northern California, where she led an off-grid and self-sufficient life while studying. She began her career as a photographer in 1996. While focusing on assignments for magazines and various music-related work, her focus has been in observing and documenting niche communities around the world.
In 2006 she shifted the focus of her attention to the culture of Japanese people in Hawaii. Since 2013, she has been partly based in Miharu, Fukushima, her work in recent years is mainly themed on the connection between Hawaii and Fukushima as embodied by immigrants.
NAGASHIMA Yurie
Photographer NAGASHIMA Yurie rose to fame with her series of everyday scenes of herself and her family at home in the nude, which earned her the PARCO prize in 1993. NAGASHIMA has consistently documented her life through photography, capturing her student yers, pregnancy and motherhood.
She continues to establish her radical artistic language with a particular interest in gender and social-class issues in Japanese society and the Japanese photography world. Her master's degree thesis in Sociology laid the foundation for her 2020 manifesto From their "girl's photography" to our Girly Photo. In this text, she expresses deep frustration with the historians and photographers, all male, who in the 1990s had both promoted and critiqued the cohort of emerging women photographers, including herself, by reductively grouping them under the label "Girly Photo."
She is considered one of Japan's most critically minded contemporary artists and an ardent activist who questions and pushes boundaries while arguing for more profound thinking, understanding, and inclusion.
NAHARASHI Asako
NAHARASHI Asako is a photographer whose work spans a diverse range of themes, genres and formats. Before entering college, she experimented with photography, building darkrooms with friends to understand the possibilities of the medium. From 1985 to 1986 she made "photo diaries" consisting of small prints she produced in the thousands.
In the late 1980s, three years after college, she travelled throughout Japan, visiting locations such as Aomori, Kyushu, the Izu Islands, and Okinawa, creating a series of black and white photographs. This work was exhibited in three separate exhibitions and, in 2023, this work was published as a book for the first time.
In 1990, NAHARASHI opened her own gallery in Tokyo, 03FOTOS, to present her work as well as that of fellow artists. In 1996, she co-founded main with the photographer ISHIUCHI Miyako. This self published magazine ran for four years, featuring their work. along with contributions from, and interviews with, others.
Her decades-long career has been the published and exhibited, garnering national acclaim and international recognition.
TAKEUCHI Mariko
TAKEUCHI Mariko is a critic, writer, curator specialising in photography and a professor at Kyoto University of the Arts. She is curator of Japanese Women Photographers exhibition in Japan, featuring 30 artists’ work. She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, photobooks, and exhibition catalogues in Japan and abroad, and co-authored numerous publications.
A Fulbright Grant took her to the United States, and she has served as a visiting researcher at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
Her curatorial work includes the Japan special feature at Paris Photo and the Japan section of the Dubai Photo Exhibition, among many other projects. Her editorial and translation credits include Disclosure: Rwandan Children Born of Rape by Jonathan Torgovnik, and her own books include Toward the Sea of Contradictions [Mujun no umi e] and Silence and Image: Essays on Japanese Photographers. She lives in Kyoto.
This event is programmed in connection to the exhibition I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers 1950s to now, curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare. The exhibition was organised by Aperture in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles with support from Kering | Women In Motion, Ishibashi Foundation, Anne Levy Charitable Trust,1970 Japan World's Exposition Memorial Fund and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Additional curatorial collaboration for the exhibition in London, with Taous Dahmani, The Photographers’ Gallery.