Japanese Women Photographers Talking for Themselves — Blind Journal

“Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now,” at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, opens with a query reasonably than a thesis. What would occur if the historical past of Japanese pictures have been informed via its ladies? For a medium so usually narrated via a handful of male names – Moriyama, Araki, Domon – the query sounds nearly provocative in its simplicity. Yet strolling via the exhibition’s three flooring, what emerges isn’t a corrective footnote to that historical past however one thing nearer to a parallel one: 27 photographers spanning seven a long time, every insisting on being seen individually reasonably than absorbed right into a single collective narrative.

The exhibition reaches London with a historical past of its personal. Originally curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare for Aperture, alongside the 2024 publication I’m So Happy You Are Here, and organised with Les Rencontres d’Arles, it has been reworked at The Photographers’ Gallery by its curator Taous Dahmani. “My worst fear would have been to flatten the celebration of their work,” she says. That concern shapes the set up: outsized wall texts naming every photographer, quotations positioned alongside the photographs, and a refusal to let 27 distinct practices collapse right into a single story about “women in Japan.” Rather than talking for these photographers, the exhibition repeatedly lets them communicate for themselves.

Dahmani’s personal route into the fabric is value pausing on. “I’ve never been to Japan, I don’t speak Japanese,” she says. She got here to the challenge as a feminist artwork historian occupied with pictures’s lacking chapters reasonably than as a specialist in Japanese pictures. That outsider’s perspective turns into one of many exhibition’s strengths. Rather than presenting a definitive historical past, it overtly acknowledges the work of trying, studying and reframing that introduced the present into being.

That strategy registers within the present’s additions for London: a commissioned timeline, constructed with two American students, laying out the authorized and social historical past of ladies’s rights in Japan alongside the parallel historical past of Japanese pictures. It didn’t exist within the authentic iteration. {A photograph} is never only a {photograph} right here – it sits in opposition to postwar occupation, a ladies’s liberation motion most Western guests will know nothing about, an equal employment regulation handed solely within the late Nineteen Eighties.

That historical past is nowhere extra legible than in Yamazawa Eiko, born on the finish of the nineteenth century, who skilled underneath the American photographer Consuelo Kanaga in California earlier than returning to Japan to open her personal studio and college, hiring solely ladies. Dahmani calls her a proto-feminist who “wouldn’t have used that word,” but Yamazawa’s personal wall textual content pushes again in opposition to that warning: “There can be no liberation of women while they are hired by men and always work in worse conditions than men.”  The language nonetheless feels startlingly up to date.

The room dedicated to Kawauchi Rinko is probably the present’s gentlest second. Her pastel, diaristic photographs of bugs, mild and small home incidents have lengthy been described as poetic nearly to the purpose of cliché, however textual content drawn from Kawauchi herself provides that poetry a sharper edge: “Part of why I make photographs is to confirm my existence. That liminal space is what feels closest to how I experience reality.” Seen alongside photographers who spent a long time preventing for institutional visibility, that liminality reads much less as delicacy than quiet insistence.

Elsewhere, the exhibition finds its quiet emotional centre in Ushioda Tokuko’s pictures of her fridge – a part of the home world she recorded whereas her photographer husband loved the popularity she largely by no means did. “I have always worked as a record keeper,” her textual content reads. “It’s very interesting to see how the world changes through the camera.” Dahmani goes additional: “Her husband took all the light.” Ushioda was solely rediscovered later, as soon as these a long time of unusual home consideration have been lastly recognised as a severe, sustained physique of labor.

A generational shift runs via the later rooms. While earlier photographers largely look outward – to labour, society and the aftermath of struggle – from the late Nineteen Eighties onwards, the digicam turns inward. Ninagawa Mika’s saturated color pictures grew from anger reasonably than ornament (“I was furious about the inequality between men and women”), whereas Nagashima Yurie’s nude self-portraits along with her household grow to be, in her phrases, “a way of taking action against the historical roles of the male and female in photography.” Dahmani describes it merely as “not apologising for who they were.”

The remaining gallery belongs to Komatsu Hiroko, a former noise musician who got here to pictures late and spent a yr staging month-to-month reveals of her personal work in a rented Tokyo store, flooding the area with black-and-white photographs of development and demolition. “A single photograph is not enough to make sense,” she stated. “When you put together multiple photographs… a meaning emerges.” Restaged floor-to-ceiling right here, it’s the most overwhelming set up within the present. Individual pictures start to dissolve into rhythm reasonably than sequence; demolition websites grow to be nearly summary, a metropolis perpetually remaking itself.

“Japan is not just incredible food and incredible cinema and incredible music and art,” Dahmani says. “It is also the stories of these women who fought to exist as artists.” There is not any single picture meant to face in for Japanese ladies’s pictures, no consultant voice. Instead there’s Yamazawa’s studio, Kawauchi’s liminal mild, Ushioda’s fridge, Nagashima’s self-portraits and Komatsu’s ruins: distinct practices linked much less by type than by their refusal to break down right into a single historical past. The exhibition resists the temptation to fabricate one. Instead, it lets the work accumulate till it turns into inconceivable to miss.

The exhibition “Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now” runs at The Photographers’ Gallery, in London, from June 24 to September 27, 2026. The guide is published by Aperture and available for $75.