Essays
The Japanese Women Who Transformed Photography
From Tokiwa Toyoko’s images of women working in the 1950s to Ushioda Tokuko’s domestic portraits, women artists have played a pivotal role in shaping the medium’s history in Japan.
In her book Women Making Art, Marsha Meskimmon poses the question, “What new knowledge can women making art produce in terms of history, subjectivity, and aesthetics?” Studying the disparate examples of Yamazawa Eiko, Tokiwa Toyoko, Ishikawa Mao, Ushioda Tokuko, and Komatsu Hiroko, we can see how women and photography come together to “remake meaning in particular social situations and aesthetic encounters.” We understand and use Meskimmon’s idea of remaking meaning as a form of creative and critical world-building, a feminist practice that Sara Ahmed describes as seizing on the promise of “loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us . . . in the struggle for more bearable worlds.” Just as Ahmed describes feminism as a praxis for women to “live better in an unjust and unequal world,” to “create relationships with others that are more equal,” and to “keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become solid as walls,” so, too, can photography be a means for women to claim the world as their own. While chronicling a history of Japanese women photographers akin to the scope and depth of the canon of male photographers may not be possible, nor is it our goal, we have found that the stories uncovered by doing this work not only diversify the canon but also reveal ever more absences and gaps in the ways that photographic history has been written in the first place.
From 1926 to 1928, Yamazawa Eiko worked in San Francisco as Consuelo Kanaga’s studio assistant and in New York with the American Hungarian fashion photographer Nickolas Muray learning the trade of studio operation and experiencing how portrait photography offered a space for experimentation and innovation. Following in the footsteps of her mentor, Yamazawa became the first woman to open a photography studio in Osaka and was often represented in Japanese newspapers and magazines as an example of the shokugyō fujin (white-collar professional woman). Yamazawa wrote in 1935, “There can be no liberation of women while they are hired by men and always work in worse conditions than men. A bright future is promised only when as many women as possible learn their own mission to live and discover their jobs.” Yamazawa’s self-representation as a business owner, mentor, and artist demonstrates how she made meaning not only with her images, but also through how she decided to live her life. Operating her own studio was a way to intervene in the discourses and social restraints around women’s labor, and her success speaks to how photography offered women opportunities to build community through their cameras.
After her return from the US, Yamazawa moved her studio to the newly opened Sogo department store in Osaka, a modern space that she transformed into an important site to mentor budding women photographers. In 1939, Keizai Magajin (Economics magazine) featured Yamazawa as a successful business owner who made a name for herself by popularizing a new photographic portraiture technique the writer called shiruetto geijutsu shashin (silhouette-art photography). The magazine held her up as a community leader and builder, citing that she had by then trained at least thirty women in her studio, many of whom went on to open their own studios. Saiki Sachiko, one such student, opened her own studio in Kyoto that her student Saeki Keiko in turn operates to this day. That these women earned a living through the studio differentiates their work from Ladies’ Camera Club in Tokyo (1937–39), whose members were led by the alpinist Murai Yoneko and included architect Tsuchiura Nobuko and novelist Muraoka Hanako. Still, the prevalence of women who made a living through photography and women who organized photography clubs demonstrates a commitment to creating work places and social organizations centered on fostering opportunities for economic emancipation and visual expression that they did not have access to elsewhere.
As it became increasingly difficult and unsafe to live and work in urban centers during the Fifteen-Year War (1931–1945), Yamazawa moved to Shinshu (present-day Nagano), where she repurposed a tofu mill as her studio. Whether making keepsake portraits for soldiers and their families or producing intimate portraits of her friend and muse, the actor Yamamoto Yasue, Yamazawa continued to use portraiture as a means for survival and as a creative refusal of the status quo. In one example, she collaborated with Yamamoto to use portrait photography to capture and communicate the ethos of particular plays and characters performed by the actor. In a visual tradition in which women’s bodies are often used as symbols of national meaning on the one hand and erotic props for the photographer’s homo-socialization on the other, Yamazawa reclaimed the portrait as a form of partnership with her subject. These portraits are documents of women who existed vividly, if briefly, for Yamazawa as their only audience at the height of armed conflict.
Though seeking to create a photographic practice that was their own, ulitamately the intimate photographic exchange between Yamamoto and Yamazawa could not escape the time and space of total war. As such, what does it mean to read them alongside photographs taken in support of the war that Yamazawa and Yamamoto sought to flee from? If Yamazawa saw in portraiture the potential to build her own photographic world around an all-women staffed studio, her contemporary Sasamoto Tsuneko seized the opportunity presented by war to insert herself into the male-dominated world of reportage, famously making claim to the title of Japan’s “first female photo-journalist.” Significantly, she achieved this status only because others interpreted her wartime propaganda photographs as “documentary photographs.” Sasamoto’s work is worth considering to understand how war provided new spaces for women to take up the camera, but that their photography was recognized as service to the wartime state. For instance, Sasamoto’s photograph of three young women singing patriotic songs became what is possibly the first photograph by a woman on the cover of a major magazine, in this case, Shashin Shūhō (Photographic Weekly Report), a propaganda mouthpiece of the Ministry of Information. Images du Japon, another publication produced by the Japanese empire, used Sasamoto’s photographs of Japanese women in the metropole as aspirational symbols for imperial subjects abroad. The same magazine published a photograph of Sasamoto as one such model of the modern working woman for viewers in Southeast Asia. Thus, Sasamoto both created and was the model of idealized images of women at play and work who supported the wartime goals of the Japanese empire. Her work from this era demonstrates how, in the context of total war, men and women alike developed photography careers by contributing to the state, just as the state sought to control their bodies and activities. Celebrating Sasamoto as Japan’s first woman photojournalist while failing to account for the dependency of this legacy on her war-time work perpetuates an ingrained pattern in Japanese photographic history—namely, the fact that most of the photographers who have entered the canon for their work documenting Japan’s war recovery, had survived in the preceding years by working in support of the wartime state.
In the postwar era, women’s photographic labor was represented in the Japanese mass media as flexible, temporary labor—a field one might participate in until marriage. Those who did take up photography as a full-time career, such as Tokiwa Toyoko, were often described as exceptional cases and reported on with much curiosity by photography and women’s magazines. Tokiwa became one of the most well-known women photographers of the 1950s for her best-selling book, Kiken na adabana (Dangerous poison flowers, 1957), which details her journey into the field of photography and her dedication to photographing women at work. Tokiwa photographed women in the Tokyo and Kanagawa areas, making visible their labor and commenting on the wide-spread view of them as anomalies. They were varied in their professions, including receptionists, fashion designers, bus drivers, sandwich-board wearers, wrestlers, pearl divers, nude models, and sex workers. Women’s magazines such as Fujin Kōron (Women’s Review) published representations of Tokiwa as an inspirational figure for the generation of women photographers who began to photograph in the 1950s. It was also the main place where Tokiwa’s series Hataraku josei (Working women) was published. This work is another example of how the placement of photographs in women’s magazines, rather than photography publications, has meant that much of this series has long been disregarded by photo historians.
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now
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I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now
Edited by Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin. Text by Takeuchi Mariko, Carrie Cushman, and Kelly Midori McCormick. Contributions by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman. Photographs by Hara Mikiko, Ishikawa Mao, Ishiuchi Miyako, Katayama Mari, Kawauchi Rinko, Komatsu Hiroko, Kon Michiko, Nagashima Yurie, Narahashi Asako, Ninagawa Mika, Nishimura Tamiko, Noguchi Rika, Nomura Sakiko, Okabe Momo, Okanoue Toshiko, Onodera Yuki, Sawada Tomoko, Shiga Lieko, Sugiura Kunié, Tawada Yuki, Tokiwa Toyoko, Ushioda Tokuko, Watanabe Hitomi, Yamazawa Eiko, and Yanagi Miwa. Designed by Ayumi Higuchi.
I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and 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. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a critical historical and contemporary framework for understanding the work in three richly illustrated essays. Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time. While this book does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, its goal is to provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.
Made possible in partnership with the Rencontres d’Arles and Kering.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 440
Number of images: 518
Publication date: 2024-09-17
Measurements: 8.25 x 11 inches
ISBN: 9781597115537
Pauline Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum. She was previously the cultural director of Magnum Photos NY, and a curator at the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris.
Lesley A. Martin is executive director of Printed Matter. Previously, she was the creative director of Aperture, where she served as editor on more than one hundred fifty books on photography, and was the founding publisher of The PhotoBook Review.
Takeuchi Mariko is a photography critic, curator, and professor at Kyoto University of the Arts. Previously, she served as visiting researcher at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and at the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
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. With Kelly Midori McCormick, she was principal investigator and codirector of the website Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography.
Kelly Midori McCormick is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, and an MA in East Asian languages and cultures from Columbia University. With Carrie Cushman, she was principal investigator and codirector of the website Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography.
Marc Feustel is a Paris-based independent curator, writer, and editor specializing in Japanese photography.
Russet Lederman is a writer, editor, and photobook collector based in New York. Previously, she taught art writing at the School of Visual Arts and cofounded 10×10 Photobooks.
Tokiwa’s approach to photographing working women transformed over time, specifically in response to her experiences in red-light districts. When Tokiwa’s exhibition, named for the Hataraku josei series, opened in 1956 at the Konishiroku Gallery in Tokyo, male critics noted that these were photographs that could have been made only by a woman due to the nature of the subject matter. Tokiwa expressed ambivalence over the suggestion that women could make exhibition-worthy photographs only when given the opportunity to enter spaces that male photographers could not. Tokiwa had first photographed sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama by spying on them from behind bathhouses, through the windows of okonomiyaki shops, and by concealing her camera behind a doctor’s white coat as she pretended to be a nurse in a clinic treating STDs. Hiding, as she later recounted in her bestselling autobiographical photobook, “on the second floor like a hunter taking aim at deer from a blind,” she photographed street scenes in front of unlicensed dealers of Philopon, or methamphetamine. Many of her images, she wrote, reflect the physical, social, and psychological distance she initially felt from those she photographed as she used techniques of photojournalism. Dressing in skirts and geta to blend in with the women, she recounted how “caught in extreme nervousness, divided between fear and skill, I walked in search of my prey (the photographic subject).” Over time, however, Tokiwa’s photographs shifted to reflect how she built relationships with the women of the red-light districts and, through this connection, photographed them from a place of empathy in an attempt to change the popular perception of them as symbols of society’s ills. No longer a photographer who lay in wait to capture an unaware subject, she became a woman faced with the difficulty of making a living in a country recovering from the devastation of total war.
Ishikawa Mao saw herself from the start of her career in the women who worked the bars around the American military bases in Okinawa—the subject of her early photography projects, which resulted in the photobooks Atsuki hibi in Kyanpu Hansen!! (Hot days in Camp Hansen!!, 1982) and Firipin (Philippines, 1989). As Ishikawa describes her process: “This is not an infiltration report. I did not intend to take ‘sneak-peek photo’ on the sidelines. I am neither a magazine photographer nor a photojournalist. I started taking photos by involving myself in the situation. It is not only a documentary but also my own emotional record. So working at a bar for African American personnel is important for me. I decided to become a lady in Kin Town.” Even including herself in some of the photographs, Ishikawa adopted an approach that differentiates her work from that of many of her teachers and contemporaries who, though questioning the role of the photographer in creating a photographic document, most often did not see themselves as making photographs from within their own communities. Ishikawa was drawn to these women, stating: “There was a freedom to say what you wanted and to live your own life. That is why these women lived freely; they were joyful, powerful, and strong. Before I knew it I had become one of them.”
Throughout her career, Ishikawa photographed from inside the worlds she inhabited, often accompanying members of Okinawan communities to their home countries to better understand how Okinawa was a point of connection for people across the world. Ishikawa’s extended work depicts the intimacy that emerged during American militarization as a trans-Pacific event, shaping the lives and identities of Okinawan women and men, Black American military men, and Filipina communities. These raucous and tender portraits speak to the “reciprocal solidarity” felt between Okinawans and Black US servicemen in the 1980s. Ishikawa has continued to photograph the American military’s ongoing—at times violent—presence in Okinawa, bringing into focus new angles on the affected communities.
Photographer Ushioda Tokuko also saw photography as a means to process the world she inhabited. From 1979 to 1983, Ushioda spent the early years of her daughter Maho’s life photographing their lived environment, a period when her career necessarily took a back seat to her responsibilities as a parent. Or did it? Ushioda published these photographs in 2022 only after rediscovering them in the family storage unit, located in the same building where she had made the majority of the images—specifically, in the single-room apartment in a Western-style house where she and her spouse, the photographer Shimao Shinzō, had started their family. Critics have called the two-volume publication, titled My Husband (2022), “highly autobiographical” and, with hesitancy, “domestic” for how it treats and elevates the most mundane, even frustrating, aspects of maintaining a household (piles of laundry, the harsh light of a lamp subdued by a scarf, a refrigerator drawn on by a child) to make them feel deeply imbued with human touch and memory.
Despite societal expectations that Ushioda focus solely on home life, the content of the images and the fact of their making in the first place are evidence of her commitment to thrive as a photographer in her early years of parenthood, when she was the primary caregiver to Maho. The photographer Nagashima Yurie, herself a mother, was quick to recognize Ushioda’s work as proof of this balancing act: “Even if you spend the vast majority of the day as a mother and a wife,” Nagashima writes in response to My Husband, “those fleeting moments when you can photograph are opportunities to validate your own existence and bring a deep sense of relief.”
Ushioda made all of the photographs in the first volume of My Husband with a medium-format camera, at times requiring a tripod. Her early work with a 35mm handheld camera is, by contrast, closer to the snapshot aesthetic prevalent in Japanese street photography of this era. Ushioda’s compositions differentiate her street photography from that of her contemporaries. She did not discreetly hunt down her subjects, as Tokiwa described her approach in the red-light districts; rather, children and adults alike stopped and participated in having their photographs made by her. As it happens, her transition to photographing objects in the home coincided with an increasing awareness that “the camera could be a weapon” and a sense of doubt related to photographing people.
Perhaps due to this growing self-consciousness, Ushioda’s portraits of women on the streets are especially powerful, and, as such, were shown in her first solo exhibition at the Shinjuku Nikon Salon in 1976. Its title, Hohoemi no tejō (Handcuffed by a smile), references the suffocating expectations for women to maintain pleasant physical appearances and attitudes in Japanese society. Given this focus, it is difficult not to read the world that Ushioda built in the photographs that now make up My Husband as an act of resistance against the gendered conventions of domesticity. Still, photography scholar Miyuki Hinton has emphasized the importance of not overstating the critical stance of this body of work. As Ushioda herself has reflected, these photographs were made at a time when she was experiencing a sense of unbalance due to the unexpected life she had begun with Shimao and becoming a parent. Photography, then, was a means of looking more closely at this new world as it came into being. Boxed up and forgotten once her daughter went to school and Ushioda was free to work outside of the home again, these photographs now attest to how critical this time was for her to hone her distinct photographic style and technique. They sow the seeds for future projects, such as Reizōko (Ice Box, 1996) and Bibliotheca (2017), which examine with stunning intimacy the highly personalized qualities of otherwise ubiquitous consumer products—refrigerators and books.
The artist Komatsu Hiroko uses photography as a model for how to build a more just and equitable world for all living beings. By her own admission, Komatsu came late to photography. She began her career as an experimental musician and started working with photography in the mid-2000s after participating in a workshop led by Kanemura Osamu, now her partner. Feeling that she needed to “catch up,” Komatsu rented an abandoned retail space in Tokyo from 2010 to 2011 to independently stage a series of exhibitions under the collective title Broiler Space. Forcing herself to mount one new exhibition per month for the entire year, Komatsu quickly ran out of usable space and had to reconsider the parameters of traditional exhibition design. This led to her singular installation method, which expanded out from the walls so photographs were draped across the floor, hung from the ceiling, and, on one occasion, even rolled outside. This material overload acted as a proxy for the photographic subject matter—new-construction and scrap materials that flowed through sites of industry. Unveiling the environmental chaos and excessive waste that undergirds processes of urban renewal, Komatsu created a space to consider the cycles of creation and destruction that define the contemporary Japanese city. In 2018, she received the Kimura Ihei Award in recognition of these interventions.
The fact that Komatsu has grown to acclaim as a photographer without a formal education in the medium is a testament not only to her tireless work ethic but also to broader structural, cultural, and social transformations that have made the contemporary art world more accommodating to women. While she does not have to contend with gender discrimination to the same degree as her predecessors, her work functions in part to question the patriarchal and capitalist-driven structures of production and criticism that persist in determining what is of value in the art world today. Since the conclusion of Broiler Space, Komatsu’s massive grids of 8-by-10-inch prints have continued to grow, adapting to the particulars of the gallery and museum spaces around the world in which they are shown. At the same time, she defies and pushes the boundaries of these art institutions by, among other tactics, forcing visitors to walk on and thus destroy her photographs; forgoing condition reports; and neglecting to produce the discrete, self-contained works sought by the art market. This is not to say that Komatsu is not interested in selling her work. Indeed, she creates artists’ books by hand that both economically sustain and conceptually innovate her art practice.
Whether creating immersive installations or more intimate encounters with artists’ books, Komatsu pushes her materials to their limits, asking important questions about how we produce, consume, and share knowledge; what is taken for granted in those processes; and how we might perceive and construct the world differently going forward. As the scholar Franz Prichard argues, the full-body experience of Komatsu’s installation work plays “a decisive role in opening up the entanglements among shared human and more-than-human worlds to potentially noisy and intensive forms of mutually reparative and regenerative relation,” aligning her work with Sara Ahmed’s definition of feminism. Critical to this practice is a form of world-building that takes the materials of photography as its foundation, thus inverting traditional approaches to photographic history and criticism that prioritize images over material realities and the social, political, and phenomenological worlds that they can engender. Indeed, Komatsu is among a ground-breaking group of contemporary photographers who are doing for photographic practice what an increasingly diverse spectrum of historians, critics, and curators are now doing for photographic history—experimenting with new modes of perception and, to repeat the feminist lesson of Marsha Meskimmon, remaking meaning.
All of these photographers transformed the practice of photography in ways that similarly interrupt longstanding criteria and assumptions about what forms of image-making are meaningful and valuable. They built worlds in the studio, on the streets, in bars, at home, and in the spaces of art institutions. Seen collectively, their work represents a range of approaches to address the power relations inherent in the acts of running businesses, connecting with photographed subjects, and sharing photographic projects with the world. In their acts of connection and self-exploration, and in their reformulations of how viewers experience the medium, each photographer should be seen as essential to the story of photography and the ongoing process of expanding and reconceiving its history.
This essay has been excerpted and edited from a longer version in I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (Aperture, 2024).
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now is made possible with generous support from Kering | Women in Motion, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, and Documentary Arts, Inc.