Miwa Yanagi’s “Elevator Girl House” series skewers the superficiality of gender roles through staged images. | ©YANAGI MIWA
By Jennifer Pastore, The Japan Times Contributing writer
For decades, women working in photography have had to fight for a place in the spotlight. “I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now,” a 2024 anthology and an ongoing international exhibition, seeks to give them the recognition they deserve.
Tokyo’s T3 Photography Festival previewed part of the exhibition last year, but the larger show, which has toured Europe and North America and attracted some 140,000 visitors, opened July 4 at Hikarie Hall in Shibuya. Organized by Bunkamura, the exhibition expands the roster to 30 women, adding Hisae Imai, Ai Iwane, Aya Fujioka and Tomoko Yoneda and bringing the total number of works on view to 200.
Twenty of the featured photographers attended the show’s preopening at Hikarie Hall. Each was called on stage in an emotional gathering of photographic talent rare in its scope and intergenerational representation.
“For a long time, the Japanese photography world has been a male-dominated society … In most cases, women were either a rare exception or merely an afterthought, says Mariko Takeuchi, a photography critic and the lead curator of the Tokyo exhibition. “The exhibition brought together artists from a wide range of generations. I believe that seeing the journeys of these female photographers come together in this tangible form, as an event that evoked that history, left a strong impression on everyone present.”
Takeuchi says that the participants were selected for their excellence — not just their status as women photographers — and that womanhood was just one aspect among a complex range of identities. The organizers took care to focus on the uniqueness of each photographer, rather than present a generalized survey.
The works are arranged in four sections that explore the possibilities of photography as a medium, its role in memory and documentation, its expressions of gender and the body and its ability to capture both the banality and magic of everyday life. The openness of the high-ceilinged rooms allows large-scale works, some of which hang from the ceiling, to be displayed even more impactfully, as though the photographers are speaking to each other. This characteristic is enhanced by unconventional textures and mediums, including scrolls of photographic paper, ceramic works and even a fabric tent.
The show includes living masters like Miyako Ishiuchi, whose series “Mother’s” (2000-05) meditates on memories of her late mother by documenting her possessions; Mao Ishikawa, who examines the American military presence in Okinawa from her lived experience documenting bars for servicemen; Kunie Sugiura, who blends science and art in photograms that directly capture light on canvas and paper, without a camera; and Miwa Yanagi, who in series like “Elevator Girl House” (1994-99) skewers the rigid superficiality of gender roles through staged, fantastical images, such as a pair of scenes showing dozens of women lined up mannequin-like in glass cases and collapsed onto a conveyor belt.
Foremothers of the genre are also given their dues: Eiko Yamazawa (1899-1995) was a pioneering commercial photographer who developed vibrant abstract compositions in primary colors beginning in the 1950s; Toyoko Tokiwa (1928-2019) opened doors with her 1957 photobook “Kiken na Adabana” (“Dangerous Poison Flowers”) that portrayed Yokohama’s red-light district; Hisae Imai (1931-2009) produced avant-garde images based on literary works like “Hamlet.”
The show also features artists expanding their practices beyond photography and taking the medium beyond two dimensions, as seen in installations by Hiroko Komatsu, Yuki Tawada, Ai Iwane and Yurie Nagashima.
There are also a few surprises: Mika Ninagawa, known for hypersaturated color, turns to black and white with recent video works, while the chance to see Hitomi Watanabe’s shots of the Zenkyoto student uprising of the 1960s, taken from behind the barricades in her urgent yet poetic style, should not be missed as these photographs are rarely exhibited at Japanese museums.
While this exhibition is the first presentation of Japanese women photographers of this scale, it is by no means meant to be comprehensive. It is, however, meant to right a longstanding wrong.
Read more and see more photos of the event at The Japan Times.
