The postwar Japanese photography that reached the West was almost entirely made by men. Twenty eight women arrive in New York this week to complicate that.
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now opens at the International Center of Photography on 15 October and runs to 11 January. It’s the first time the show has been seen in the United States. It began at Rencontres d’Arles in 2024 and has since traveled to The Hague, Frankfurt, London and Tokyo.
Twenty eight photographers, spanning seventy years and several generations, across photography, installation, photobooks and printed matter. It’s curated by Pauline Vermare of the Brooklyn Museum, Lesley A. Martin of Printed Matter and the critic Takeuchi Mariko of Kyoto University of the Arts, and presented with Aperture, which published the accompanying book in 2024.
The gap it fills
Ask most photographers to name the Japanese postwar canon and you’ll get Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Nobuyoshi Araki. All of them men, and all of them genuinely significant. What that list has never reflected is that women were working the whole time, often in the same cities and the same years, and mostly didn’t get exported.
Several of the names here are ones a monochrome photographer will want to look up. Ishiuchi Miyako, whose Yokosuka Story and later work on her mother turned grain and scratch into the actual subject. Tokiwa Toyoko, photographing women in occupied Yokohama in the 1950s. Nishimura Tamiko. Okanoue Toshiko, who was making surrealist photomontage in the early 1950s. Yamazawa Eiko, who was working professionally decades before any of this.
The contemporary end of the room is a different matter, and much of it is in color. Rinko Kawauchi, Hiromix, Mika Ninagawa, Mari Katayama. The show’s argument is that these belong in one story rather than two, and the span from Yamazawa to Katayama is what makes that argument rather than just asserting it.
If you can’t get to New York
The Aperture book of the same name came out in 2024 and carries the essays, the historical material and a bibliography of photobooks by Japanese women, which is the part that will keep being useful long after the show closes. The photobook is central to how much of this work was made and circulated in the first place, so a book is a less compromised substitute here than it usually is.