Miyako Ishiuchi
Our first Woman of the Week this year is Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi.
Born Fujikura Yōko, Miyako moved with her family to Yokosuka when she was six years old, a coastal town that had served as a major American naval base during WWII. In 1966, she moved to Tokyo to study design and textiles at Tama Art University and became involved in the wave of student barricade protests in 1969. She would drop out during her second year, deciding to take up photography instead.
For her first exhibition, she returned to Yokosuka, a city she felt had always borne a sense of ‘fear, grief, resentment, and disorientation’ throughout her childhood. She decided to capture the residual traces of American occupation the city still carried, exploring the disintegration and aversion that accompanied the relics of these foreign influences. For Miyako, her images carry a visceral, almost carnal aspect - they are not something to be solely perceived, but sensed and experienced in their material form.
This catharsis begins with her own treatment of the images in the darkroom. She likened developing the Yokosuka series, to ‘coughing up black phlegm’, roll printing the paper “bit by bit” with each chemical grain marking out the image. She exhibited the photographs by directly sticking them on the wall to emphasise the “sheer physicality” of the photographic paper.
This exploration of the material and the lingering traces that accompany the passage of time are a common theme throughout her work. Her 1991 series explores scars as a sort of memory that is inscribed in the body. Each photograph is simply marked by the cause of the scar – ‘accident’, ‘illness’, ‘war’. For Miyako, “space is formed from the accumulation of detail”, therefore scars carry the remains of a damage like Yokosuka bears the remains of the war – a testament to what was once there.
This concept, presented through her signature, gritty and grainy photographs, has made her one of the most influential female Japanese photographers in recent history. In 2005, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, and became the third Japanese photographer to receive the Hasselblad Foundation Award in 2015.
Sources
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-getty-postwar-photos-20151025-story.html
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/14296/ishiuchi-miyako-photographer-mothers-exhibition-stills-edinburgh
https://michaelhoppen.viewingroom.com/viewing-room/4-ishiuchi-miyako-artist-feature/
https://aperture.org/editorial/ishiuchi-miyako-chronicles-of-time-and-history/
https://www.frieze.com/article/ishiuchi-miyako-stills-gallery-2022-review
https://ibashogallery.com/artists/122-miyako-ishiuchi/overview/
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ishiuchi-miyako-postwar-shadows-the-j-paul-getty-museum/dgWRlhrN721vSA?hl=en