Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces

A fifty-year career retrospective of Ishiuchi Miyako, Japan’s most influential living female photographer.

Through subjects as diverse as old apartment blocks, human scars, kimono fabrics, personal belongings of the deceased and even her own water-damaged prints, Ishiuchi Miyako manifests the invisible, capturing time, atmosphere and memory in photographic form. Her work is at once deeply personal and evocative of the wider world hinted at by the traces recorded within the frame.

Since beginning her career in the 1970s, Ishiuchi has become one of Japan’s foremost photographers, leading the way for female practitioners in a scene that has traditionally been male dominated. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces charts the course of her practice over fifty years and identifies themes that resurface throughout her work, including her relationship with place, the passage of time and the bodies and possessions of people, always with an emphasis on materiality and ephemerality. Three thematic sections – Town, Skin & Scars and Things Left Behind – include series such as Yokosuka Story, which documents her hometown; 1 · 9 · 4 · 7, in which she photographed the hands and feet of fifty women born in the same year as her; and Frida, which catalogues the possessions of the artist Frida Kahlo. The major photographic series appear alongside lesser-known works and previously unpublished material.

With extracts from Ishiuchi’s previous writings, an in-depth interview by Lena Fritsch and a newly commissioned essay by Ishiuchi herself, the artist’s voice is present throughout.

About the Author

Ishiuchi Miyako is a Japanese photographer based in Gunma prefecture. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including Kimura Ihei Memorial Photographic Award (1978) and the Hasselblad Award (2014). Her work is included in collections worldwide. Lena Fritsch is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century Japanese art and photography and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Her publications include Ravens and Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945. Yasufumi Nakamori is the former Vice President of Arts and Culture at Asia Society and Director at Asia Society Museum, New York. Before this, he was the senior curator of international art (photography) at Tate in London. His previous publications include monographs of Ishimoto Yasuhiro and Hosoe Eikoh.