The Japanese Women Who Rewrote Photography’s Rules

Between 2010 and 2011, the photographer Komatsu Hiroko staged a monthly exhibition series in a rented retail space in Tokyo. Under the moniker Broiler Space, Komatsu flooded the venue every two weeks with her distinctive black-and-white prints of industrial sites, inviting visitors to engage with her ideas about maximalism and minimalism. At The Photographers’ Gallery in London, this striking floor-to-ceiling installation is restaged as part of a new exhibition, Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, on display through September 27. “It was really important for the gallery to show expanded practices,” says curator Taous Dahmani, who brought the exhibition, curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare, to the U.K. “Photography is not just documentary or art, it’s also how we push the boundaries of the medium.”

Informed by the 2024 Aperture book, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers 1950s to Now, the new survey features more than 200 works from 27 artists and has been developed as a kind of introduction, focused on the different visual languages that have come out of Japan over the past eight decades and how these have shaped both the way Japan sees itself, and how it is viewed by outsiders. Punctuated by political developments—such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Law, passed in 1985 and implemented the following year—the show highlights how photographers have explored and continue to study gender and identity, pop culture, nature, fashion, music, motherhood, and the everyday. Not only does Japanese Woman Photographers span all floors of the gallery, it also spills into the nearby Soho Photography Quarter with Ninagawa Mika’s Creative Blooms.

Early on, there are works by the pioneering photographer Yamazawa Eiko, who became an apprentice for the Oregon-born photographer Consuelo Kanaga in California in the 1920s. Later, returning to Japan, she opened her own photo studio in Osaka in 1931 before establishing the Yamazawa Institute of Photography in 1950. “She bridged commercial portraiture, artistic innovation, and abstract photography experimentation, and was dedicated to making sure women photographers were learning the craft, and also that she could employ women,” Dahmani says. “She was absolutely extraordinary in the context of Japan and the enormously thick glass ceiling for women at the time.” Elsewhere, there are intimate and raw family self-portraits by Nagashima Yurie, Ishikawa Mao’s black-and-white photographs of the women she met working in bars near U.S. military bases in Okinawa in the 1970s, and Hara Mikiko’s delicate fragments of everyday life.

“One can question the necessity to focus on a region or gender. But today, in a world of polarization, fascism, sexism and homophobia, it feels urgent,” says Dahmani. “I didn’t want audiences to say, ‘I saw a show of 27 Japanese women photographers,’ I wanted each of them to be celebrated. It was about making a statement, too: in an age where people are going back to more conservative ideas, making sure that where we stand [as a gallery] is clear.” That sentiment is subtly referenced in the purple text panels that announce each section, a bright shade borrowed from an early pamphlet about women’s rights in Japan. “Photography is this strange medium that both engages with reality and the fiction of art, using aesthetics as a gateway to something else,” Dahmani adds, pointing to the timeline on one of the upper levels, which provides a written context of Japanese history, women’s history, women’s photo history, and Japanese photo history.

While much of the gallery is concentrated around framed photographs, a series of sleek metal vitrines—a collaboration with designer and art director Masaki Miwa—holds significant books and magazines, (downstairs, there’s a reading room with more contemporary editions). “It was the way women made themselves known or circulated their work; they really cared about making sure it was printed,” Dahmani says. Presented alongside her selfies and teen-made images of flowers and clouds is Hiromax’s first photo book, I’m Hiromix: Girls Blue. Published in 1996, it broke sales records at the time and would go on to become a key marker of ’90s visual culture. That same year, Ishiuchi Miyako and Narahashi Asako established the magazine Main, several issues of which appear in the exhibition. Named using their initials, it ran for ten issues until 2000, and became a vehicle for many of their peers whose work was featured inside. “The books are extremely present because they were so important—unlike exhibitions, they stay.,” Dahmani adds. “Even if they’re ignored at the time, they enable researchers, art historians, and curators to rewrite these missing chapters of photo history.”