A critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now presents a much-needed challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society.
Learn more in this conversation as coeditors Lesley A. Martin and Pauline Vermare join Carrie Cushman, a photo-historian and contributor to I’m So Happy You Are Here. This program was presented in partnership with Leica Gallery.
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This event was originally recorded on November 22, 2024.
Image: Ishikawa Mao, Kin, Koza (present-day Okinawa City), Okinawa Prefecture, 1975–77; from the series Akabanaa (Red flower). Courtesy Nap Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture
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.
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.
Carrie Cushman is the Edith Dale Monson Gallery Director and Curator at the Hartford Art School. She holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University and is a specialist in postwar and contemporary art and photography from Japan. She contributed “The Japanese Women Who Transformed Photography” to I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now.
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