Linger Later

Much effort has been put toward filling in the gaps of art history where marginalized identities worked in the shadows without the consideration or recognition their creative production merited. But the job is never finished. Out now from Aperture, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now is another charge toward this goal.

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As summarized by art historian and curator Pauline Vermare in an introductory essay to the volume: “One of the main goals of this project is to showcase Japanese women’s perspectives on history as well as on their own experiences.” The result no less serves to highlight the particular challenges and nuances Japanese women have faced in fighting for fair treatment legally, economically and socially since the later half of the 20th century. “To be a woman in Japan is to live with constant conflict,” contends critic and curator Takeuchi Mariko in another written work. “In a country where attitudes toward gender remain extremely conservative, simply being a woman exposes one to many forms of prejudice and discrimination.”

There were few enough women pursuing the profession of photography in Japan that history can pinpoint the first known female photographer in Japan as Shima Ryū. Born in 1823 and married to another photographer, Shima Kakoku, she was behind one of the nation’s first portraits featuring a smiling subject: that of her own husband, playfully holding up a pumpkin. 

But the book’s focus starts halfway into the next century, when Japan was reeling from the end of World War II and the deployment of atomic bombs on its soil. At the same time, the country had just granted women the right to vote. Some of the female Japanese voices in photography who emerged in the 1950s found grim inspiration in the culture of “comfort women” as fostered by the American occupation of Japan from the war’s end in 1945 to 1952. Toyoko Tokiwa, for instance, documented the lifestyles of the sex workers who frequented the Yokohama military base, before later turning her lens to those representative of women’s evolving role in society more broadly. By the 1970s, trends in photography saw private life recontextualized as art for public consumption, with female creatives bringing singular points of view. Emerging against this zeitgeist, Nishimura Tamiko became a pioneer in a genre known as shishashin (“I-photography”), describing bodies of work that trace a personal narrative. 

All the while the male gaze, glaring from both fetishistic Western voyeurism of Japanese traditions (think about perception of the geisha) as well as from native Japanese men, created a steady stream of objectifying, if not dehumanizing portrayal of women’s bodies, feeding an insatiable desire for such imagery as modern mass media grew in reach. In turn this gave way to vigorous creativity in female photographers pushing back at such a pervasive culture of misogyny. “A major issue and photographic subject to emerge in the work of postwar women photog­raphers was the commodification of women’s bodies,” as Vermare puts it. The rejoinder reached a fever pitch in the 1990s, with the decade giving rise to a number of gender-subversive points of view. Take Hiromix, whose 1996 photobook, titled Girls Blue, combining self-portraiture and documentary photography of her own life as a young woman, set sales records with 30,000 copies sold and would go on to epitomize the genre called Girly Photo, a female gaze-centric reflection of circa ’90s youth culture. Tokyo-born Nagashima Yurie rose to international acclaim for an intimate photo-series of her whole family in the nude in their home; she’d later capture her own pregnancy on her own raw, flesh-baring terms. Then there was Nomura Sakiko, who reversed the male gaze entirely with her pensive, black-and-white portraits of male nudes, that also appeared to value their subjects for their introspection rather than for overt sex appeal. 

While still holding the feminist thread, the contemporary generation took performativity to new heights. In the aughts, Mika Ninagawa published the 2004 photobook EROTIC TEACHER×××YUCA, in which the artist took sensual self-portraits cosplaying as tropes from a Lolita type to a “sexy sumo wrestler.” Katayama Mari, who was born with underdeveloped bones in her lower legs and hand, takes up a sublime visual language as she reimagines her own form and the natural environments in which she stages her images in fantastical terms. In her bystander #014, 2016, we see her collapsed on a beach in front of the water, surrounded by a pile of fake, fabric limbs yet herself appearing serene. 

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As for the title of the tome, it takes on a newly poignant meaning in the context of its source: paraphrasing a line from a poem in Kawauchi Rinko’s 2010 photobook, the eyes, the ears. “Once in a while, / we should look into each others eyes. / Otherwise we might feel lost. I’m so glad that you are here,” it reads. And on that note, why not linger longer? 

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I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now is out now available online now.