Celebrating the Influence of Japanese Women Photographers

Aperture and the Institute of Fine Arts have partnered to establish a series of conversations that center photography as a creative act and means of responding to urgent questions in the world around us. This convening of photo-committed makers and thinkers fosters a critical yet community-oriented environment for reflection and learning.

This October, we will look toward I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (Aperture, 2024) as a point of departure—a title that addresses the exclusion of Japanese women from the photographic canon, while also presenting their subversive expansion of the medium’s forms through critical observations of life in Japanese society.

Catherine Quan Damman, an assistant professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will introduce the topic. Esteemed panelists Lesley A. Martin, former creative director at Aperture and editor of this title, Pauline Vermare, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum and coeditor of this title, Yasufumi Nakamori, director of the Asia Society Museum, and Sugiura Kunié, an artist featured in this title, will discuss the work of these Japanese women photographers and the book’s recontextualization of their photographs, videos, and photobooks.

The exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now is currently on view through September 29, 2024, at Rencontres d’Arles, France, and will then travel to Fotomuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, from January 18 to May 25, 2025.

Live participation is limited to invite-only. Post-event recordings will be accessible to the public through Aperture’s YouTube channel.

Related Items

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

Shop Now

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

Join Now

—

Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her practices as educator and researcher are informed by feminist, queer, disability, and critical race studies, as well as the relationships between form, labor, and value in twentieth-century art.

Lesley A. Martin is executive director of Printed Matter, New York, and editor of I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now. Previously, she was the creative director of Aperture, where she served as editor on more than one hundred fifty books, and was the founding publisher of The PhotoBook Review.

Sugiura Kunié was born in Nagoya, Japan, and has lived and worked in New York for over fifty years. Sugiura’s process addresses the materiality of photography and the concept of documenting images. Sugiura is a featured artist in I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, showcasing her work from the late 1960s to early 2000s. 

Yasufumi Nakamori is the museum director and vice president for Global Artistic Programs at the Asia Society Museum, New York. Previously, he was the senior curator, international art (photography), at Tate Modern, London. Nakamori is an accomplished curator of photography and a noted scholar of modern and contemporary Asian art from cross-disciplinary and transnational perspectives.

Pauline Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, and the coeditor of I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now. She was previously the cultural director of Magnum Photos, New York, and a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris.

—

Image: Sugiura Kunié, Rashomon, 1997; from I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now