Ishiuchi Miyako: Grain and Image

Overview

Ishiuchi Miyako (born in 1947) is currently one of the most highly acclaimed photographers in the world. Her many honors include being the first Asian woman to receive the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2014.

After studying weaving at Tama Art University, Ishiuchi began taking photographs on her own. She was quickly recognized for her coarse-grained, monochrome pictures of Yokosuka, the city where Ishiuchi spent her adolescence, and former red-light districts in various parts of Japan. In recent years, the artist’s work “ひろしま/hiroshima,” which deals with clothing used by victims of the atomic bomb, and a series depicting the personal effects of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo have led to even greater renown.

Twenty-seventeen is the 40th anniversary of Ishiuchi’s solo exhibition “Yokosuka Story,” which in effect marked her debut as a photographer. Slated for this landmark year, this exhibition focuses on “grain,” one of Ishiuchi’s keywords, and consists of approximately 240 items from thirteen series, from her early years to never-before-shown works.

Through these photographs of abandoned buildings, scars, silk kimono beloved by women of the Taisho and Showa era who played an important role in the modernization of Japan, and personal articles that belonged to the artist’s mother and atomic-bomb victims, the exhibition presents Ishiuchi Miyako’s world, in which she has consistently addressed themes such as existence and absence, people’s memories, and vestiges of time.



The forty years since I set up my darkroom in Yokohama have passed quickly. The photographs born there are now vintage prints, the particles of their grain conspicuous after digesting their fill of air and time. My images, launched in Yokosuka, convey their individual spirits to merge history, the human body and things left behind and set off into the future.

Ishiuchi Miyako