This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Pauline Vermare, a photography historian, curator, and writer, is working on a book and an exhibition featuring the work of over a hundred Japanese women photographers, who are often overlooked. In this conversation, conducted via Zoom on November 24, 2021, she discusses these photographers with Alan Govenar. She curated, with Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Takanashi, the show “10/10, Celebrating Japanese Women Photographers,” which showed at the KYOTOGRAPHIE international photography festival in April 9 - May 8, 2022. |
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Alan Govenar: How did you become interested and engaged with Japanese women photographers?
Pauline Vemare: I grew up in Japan, and have been working in photography for over twenty years, yet I had never really gotten involved with Japanese photography. But when French photography historians Luce Lebart and Marie Robert invited me to contribute to their anthology Histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Paris: Textuel, 2020; recently published by Thames & Hudson as A World History of Women Photographers) I chose to write about a few Japanese photographers, and when the book came out, Manon Demurger, then head of public programming at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, invited me to give an online masterclass on Japanese women photographers. This prompted me to dive deeper into the subject, and as I was researching, it occurred to me that there were very few resources on female Japanese photographers. Most of the essays, books, and exhibitions on Japanese photography until now had focused primarily on male photographers, particularly of the ‘Provoke’ era. Japanese women tended to be looked at – with a strong emphasis on sexuality and the body – as opposed to looking, behind the camera, with agency. Through these photographers’ books, and thanks to colleagues including Miyuki Hinton, Russet Lederman, Amanda Maddox, Masako Sato and Miwa Susuda - I was able to identify a great number of photographers for that presentation. Preparing for the talk, and giving it, was a life changing experience for me: I was deeply moved to discover all these artists, and so was the audience. Seeing their work - beautiful, eclectic – was a revelation for us all. And so, after this masterclass, it dawned on me that there was a dire need for a publication on the subject, otherwise we would keep on not knowing about these photographers, about their work and their narratives. Lesley Martin, creative director of Aperture, who had been working toward a project revolving around Japanese women photographers from the 1990s, was very excited about the idea of such a book, and it is a pleasure to be working with her. Marianne Thery and Manon Lenoir of Textuel will publish the French edition of the book, that will also be published in Japan simultaneously. The book is due to come out in 2024, in time for a show in Arles. We are now well underway, working with a brilliant editorial committee composed of Carrie Cushman, Kelly Midori McCormick, Amanda Maddox and Mariko Takeuchi, as well as with Russet Lederman and Marc Feustel whp are working on a richly illustrated bibliography. We intend for it to become a reference on the subject, a resource for photo historians, scholars, specialists of Japan, and photo lovers alike, that will convey the amount, the scope, and the diversity of these photographers’ work, individually as well as collectively. Many Japanese photo historians, gallerists, curators and publishers have championed Japanese women photographers in the past 30 years– including Tomoka Aya, Noriko Fuku, Kimi Himeno, Michiko Kasahara, Yuri Mitsuda, Miwa Susuda, Sayaka Takahashi, Mariko Takeuchi or Miyako Yoshinaga - as well as many outside of Japan. With this project we intend to continue their work, and to make it more widely accessible in Japan as well as internationally.
Pauline Vemare: I grew up in Japan, and have been working in photography for over twenty years, yet I had never really gotten involved with Japanese photography. But when French photography historians Luce Lebart and Marie Robert invited me to contribute to their anthology Histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Paris: Textuel, 2020; recently published by Thames & Hudson as A World History of Women Photographers) I chose to write about a few Japanese photographers, and when the book came out, Manon Demurger, then head of public programming at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, invited me to give an online masterclass on Japanese women photographers. This prompted me to dive deeper into the subject, and as I was researching, it occurred to me that there were very few resources on female Japanese photographers. Most of the essays, books, and exhibitions on Japanese photography until now had focused primarily on male photographers, particularly of the ‘Provoke’ era. Japanese women tended to be looked at – with a strong emphasis on sexuality and the body – as opposed to looking, behind the camera, with agency. Through these photographers’ books, and thanks to colleagues including Miyuki Hinton, Russet Lederman, Amanda Maddox, Masako Sato and Miwa Susuda - I was able to identify a great number of photographers for that presentation. Preparing for the talk, and giving it, was a life changing experience for me: I was deeply moved to discover all these artists, and so was the audience. Seeing their work - beautiful, eclectic – was a revelation for us all. And so, after this masterclass, it dawned on me that there was a dire need for a publication on the subject, otherwise we would keep on not knowing about these photographers, about their work and their narratives. Lesley Martin, creative director of Aperture, who had been working toward a project revolving around Japanese women photographers from the 1990s, was very excited about the idea of such a book, and it is a pleasure to be working with her. Marianne Thery and Manon Lenoir of Textuel will publish the French edition of the book, that will also be published in Japan simultaneously. The book is due to come out in 2024, in time for a show in Arles. We are now well underway, working with a brilliant editorial committee composed of Carrie Cushman, Kelly Midori McCormick, Amanda Maddox and Mariko Takeuchi, as well as with Russet Lederman and Marc Feustel whp are working on a richly illustrated bibliography. We intend for it to become a reference on the subject, a resource for photo historians, scholars, specialists of Japan, and photo lovers alike, that will convey the amount, the scope, and the diversity of these photographers’ work, individually as well as collectively. Many Japanese photo historians, gallerists, curators and publishers have championed Japanese women photographers in the past 30 years– including Tomoka Aya, Noriko Fuku, Kimi Himeno, Michiko Kasahara, Yuri Mitsuda, Miwa Susuda, Sayaka Takahashi, Mariko Takeuchi or Miyako Yoshinaga - as well as many outside of Japan. With this project we intend to continue their work, and to make it more widely accessible in Japan as well as internationally.
Govenar: How old were you when you first lived in Japan?
Vermare: I moved to Tokyo when I was 10. When I came back to France, I studied Japanese in Paris, at a school called Langues Orientales (INALCO). Part of my family is Japanese and I have always remained very close to Japan. The last time I was there was in 2017, when I organized a Saul Leiter retrospective, with Masako Sato and the Saul Leiter Foundation, at the Bunkamura Museum in Tokyo. Last year, Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, the founders and directors of the Kyotographie Festival, invited me to co-curate a show with them, “10/10”, featuring ten contemporary Japanese women photographers on the occasion of the festival’s 10th edition: Yukari Chikura, Noriko Hayashi, Mayumi Hosokura, Ariko Inaoka, Aï Iwane, Momo Okabe, Harumi Shimizu, Mayumi Suzuki, Hideka Tonomura, and Tamaki Yoshida. It was a joy to get to work with these artists and with the festival’s team.
Govenar: How do you think these photographers interrogate this issue of truth? Is it truth in the image? Is it a truth of who they are?
Vermare: I would say that it is the truth of their own existence, of being a woman, of being a photographer, an artist, in Japan’s society, history, environment. Looking at their work, you see that all of them have very different ways of approaching and expressing their own truth, or that of others - often, women’s stories - from a woman’s point of view. Miyako Ishiuchi, one of the few Japanese photographers to gain as much recognition as her male contemporaries, albeit later in her career, is one of the photographers who has been the clearest about this, about her desire to express her own truths through photography. She created a very personal documentary body of work in Yokosuka, the town she grew up in, where an American military base was located. As she explained: “I started photographing Yokosuka because I felt I was the only one who could reveal the city’s true face. Of course, I was aware of the series made by Daidō Moriyama and Shōmei Tōmatsu. But they had pictured Yokosuka through the eyes of men, whereas I, as a woman, was not allowed access to the American base. They photographed America, whereas I depicted the story of my childhood. My approach was more intimate.”[1] I think this is a very important statement. That was a truth she felt she had to express: the truth of being a woman in post-war Japan, occupied by America, and looking at other women. That's the basis of her first body of work. As she turned 40, she started thinking about the body - about the fact that a woman in her forties was not considered attractive anymore, in commercials and so on. She started focusing on the skin, and the scars, and the bodies of women who were, like her, 40 years old. Then she produced a body of work on her mother: a series of photographs of objects that had belonged to her mother – clothes, shoes, lipstick, etc. “Mother’s” is the project that made her famous. In terms of ‘truth in photography’, Ishiuchi is one of the most striking examples of a photographer who has spent her whole life documenting what truth was to her, documenting history from her own perspective. And in many ways, this also applies to the generations after her, especially the most recent generations. I’m thinking, for instance, of Tokyo Rumando, a performing artist who has also been discussing the truth of being who she is, performing with her camera. The book My Husband (Torch Press, 2022), gathering photographs made in the 1980s by Tokuko Ushioda, presenting her daily life as a wife, as a mother and as a photographer, is also very interesting in that regard: I love the idea of the “contre-champ”, of the reverse shot –to see the story “from the other side”.
[1] Miyako Ishiuchi, Anaïs Roesch & Matylda Taszycka, "Ishiuchi Miyako: Photography as a Trace." In Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions magazine (AWARE), 11.7.2020
Vermare: I moved to Tokyo when I was 10. When I came back to France, I studied Japanese in Paris, at a school called Langues Orientales (INALCO). Part of my family is Japanese and I have always remained very close to Japan. The last time I was there was in 2017, when I organized a Saul Leiter retrospective, with Masako Sato and the Saul Leiter Foundation, at the Bunkamura Museum in Tokyo. Last year, Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, the founders and directors of the Kyotographie Festival, invited me to co-curate a show with them, “10/10”, featuring ten contemporary Japanese women photographers on the occasion of the festival’s 10th edition: Yukari Chikura, Noriko Hayashi, Mayumi Hosokura, Ariko Inaoka, Aï Iwane, Momo Okabe, Harumi Shimizu, Mayumi Suzuki, Hideka Tonomura, and Tamaki Yoshida. It was a joy to get to work with these artists and with the festival’s team.
Govenar: How do you think these photographers interrogate this issue of truth? Is it truth in the image? Is it a truth of who they are?
Vermare: I would say that it is the truth of their own existence, of being a woman, of being a photographer, an artist, in Japan’s society, history, environment. Looking at their work, you see that all of them have very different ways of approaching and expressing their own truth, or that of others - often, women’s stories - from a woman’s point of view. Miyako Ishiuchi, one of the few Japanese photographers to gain as much recognition as her male contemporaries, albeit later in her career, is one of the photographers who has been the clearest about this, about her desire to express her own truths through photography. She created a very personal documentary body of work in Yokosuka, the town she grew up in, where an American military base was located. As she explained: “I started photographing Yokosuka because I felt I was the only one who could reveal the city’s true face. Of course, I was aware of the series made by Daidō Moriyama and Shōmei Tōmatsu. But they had pictured Yokosuka through the eyes of men, whereas I, as a woman, was not allowed access to the American base. They photographed America, whereas I depicted the story of my childhood. My approach was more intimate.”[1] I think this is a very important statement. That was a truth she felt she had to express: the truth of being a woman in post-war Japan, occupied by America, and looking at other women. That's the basis of her first body of work. As she turned 40, she started thinking about the body - about the fact that a woman in her forties was not considered attractive anymore, in commercials and so on. She started focusing on the skin, and the scars, and the bodies of women who were, like her, 40 years old. Then she produced a body of work on her mother: a series of photographs of objects that had belonged to her mother – clothes, shoes, lipstick, etc. “Mother’s” is the project that made her famous. In terms of ‘truth in photography’, Ishiuchi is one of the most striking examples of a photographer who has spent her whole life documenting what truth was to her, documenting history from her own perspective. And in many ways, this also applies to the generations after her, especially the most recent generations. I’m thinking, for instance, of Tokyo Rumando, a performing artist who has also been discussing the truth of being who she is, performing with her camera. The book My Husband (Torch Press, 2022), gathering photographs made in the 1980s by Tokuko Ushioda, presenting her daily life as a wife, as a mother and as a photographer, is also very interesting in that regard: I love the idea of the “contre-champ”, of the reverse shot –to see the story “from the other side”.
[1] Miyako Ishiuchi, Anaïs Roesch & Matylda Taszycka, "Ishiuchi Miyako: Photography as a Trace." In Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions magazine (AWARE), 11.7.2020
TiP: Talk about the thread of feminism and Japanese women photography.
Vermare: “Feminism” means different things in the U.S., in France and in Japan, because of course of different histories, societies, different struggles for women to become independent. Many Japanese women photographers have struggled to not (or not only) be domestic, many of them express this in their work, and many had to study or work abroad, at least for a while, in the U.S. or Europe, because it was too hard for them to exist as photographers in Japan. But most of them do not feel comfortable with the label of “feminist”. The issues related to feminism in Japan are quite layered and sensitive. There are many reasons for it.
Vermare: “Feminism” means different things in the U.S., in France and in Japan, because of course of different histories, societies, different struggles for women to become independent. Many Japanese women photographers have struggled to not (or not only) be domestic, many of them express this in their work, and many had to study or work abroad, at least for a while, in the U.S. or Europe, because it was too hard for them to exist as photographers in Japan. But most of them do not feel comfortable with the label of “feminist”. The issues related to feminism in Japan are quite layered and sensitive. There are many reasons for it.
TiP: I think that's a very good point.
Vermare: Many photographers active in the 1960s and 1970s were close to the Women’s Lib Movement when it came to Japan, yet they don’t identify with “feminism”. But you do have the notable example of photographer and writer Yurie Nagashima, who has been using photography and the arts in general as a form of activism for many years, as a direct response to what was and is imposed onto women photographers, and women in general, in Japan, for generations. But what Nagashima talks about has more to do with non-conformism, in general, and a desire to express oneself outside of what is expected from a “woman” in Japan. In a different way, this is also what Momo Okabe is dealing with in her work on gender: with the struggle of being a misfit, and the right to being non-conform in Japanese society.
I would say, in terms of ‘truth in photography,’ that Ishiuchi is one of the most striking examples of a photographer who has spent her whole life documenting what truth was to her, documenting history from her own perspective. All of these different iterations of what it meant for her to be a woman, and to be herself. And in many ways, this also applies to the generations after her, especially the most recent generations. I’m thinking, for instance, of Tokyo Rumando, an incredibly talented performing artist who has also been discussing the truth of being who she is, performing with her camera. Photography enabled these women to speak out their own truth, that was so seldom heard. Some of them use it to talk about the environment, others to talk about their families, about being or not being a mother, about gender, grief, desire, sexuality… Expressing all these aspects of one's identity and existence, through photography. And I think what moves me with this project is to hear all of these voices that we hadn't heard, or had barely heard before. It is truly a treasure trove. And, to answer your question, I think their work collectively contributes to multiplying and complexifying the truth, the truths, about Japanese history and society.
Vermare: Many photographers active in the 1960s and 1970s were close to the Women’s Lib Movement when it came to Japan, yet they don’t identify with “feminism”. But you do have the notable example of photographer and writer Yurie Nagashima, who has been using photography and the arts in general as a form of activism for many years, as a direct response to what was and is imposed onto women photographers, and women in general, in Japan, for generations. But what Nagashima talks about has more to do with non-conformism, in general, and a desire to express oneself outside of what is expected from a “woman” in Japan. In a different way, this is also what Momo Okabe is dealing with in her work on gender: with the struggle of being a misfit, and the right to being non-conform in Japanese society.
I would say, in terms of ‘truth in photography,’ that Ishiuchi is one of the most striking examples of a photographer who has spent her whole life documenting what truth was to her, documenting history from her own perspective. All of these different iterations of what it meant for her to be a woman, and to be herself. And in many ways, this also applies to the generations after her, especially the most recent generations. I’m thinking, for instance, of Tokyo Rumando, an incredibly talented performing artist who has also been discussing the truth of being who she is, performing with her camera. Photography enabled these women to speak out their own truth, that was so seldom heard. Some of them use it to talk about the environment, others to talk about their families, about being or not being a mother, about gender, grief, desire, sexuality… Expressing all these aspects of one's identity and existence, through photography. And I think what moves me with this project is to hear all of these voices that we hadn't heard, or had barely heard before. It is truly a treasure trove. And, to answer your question, I think their work collectively contributes to multiplying and complexifying the truth, the truths, about Japanese history and society.
TiP: It is a complex issue.
Pauline: It is. All in all, gender and agency seem to be more critical notions in this context. They go hand in hand with that of the body. This has been true since the 1950s: Toyoko Tokiwa’s book Kiken na Adabana (1957) (“Dangerous Toxic Flowers”), that has been praised as one of the most important books in the history of Japanese photography, was dedicated to ‘women who work’, or ‘women at work’, a euphemism as most of the subjects in it were prostitutes working near the American military base of Yokohama. Both photographs and texts were by Tokiwa, which was in and of itself a revolution at the time. The cover of the book shows her behind her camera with her eyes open. Many Japanese female photographers have since been using photography to deal with these issues. Many have used their own body and self-portraiture to express themselves: arguably more so than most, photography enabled Japanese women to speak out their own truth. Beyond personal narratives, there were also many studio photographers, fashion photographers, abstract photographers, some who focused on society, politics, spirituality, the environment, on family, on trauma and grief … This project allows us to discover so many voices and experiences that we hadn't heard, or had barely heard before. Collectively, they contribute to multiplying and complexifying the truth, the truths, about Japanese history and society. As a photography historian, and as a woman who grew up in Japan, it is a huge relief and joy to be able to see and to show Japan and the world through their eyes.
Pauline: It is. All in all, gender and agency seem to be more critical notions in this context. They go hand in hand with that of the body. This has been true since the 1950s: Toyoko Tokiwa’s book Kiken na Adabana (1957) (“Dangerous Toxic Flowers”), that has been praised as one of the most important books in the history of Japanese photography, was dedicated to ‘women who work’, or ‘women at work’, a euphemism as most of the subjects in it were prostitutes working near the American military base of Yokohama. Both photographs and texts were by Tokiwa, which was in and of itself a revolution at the time. The cover of the book shows her behind her camera with her eyes open. Many Japanese female photographers have since been using photography to deal with these issues. Many have used their own body and self-portraiture to express themselves: arguably more so than most, photography enabled Japanese women to speak out their own truth. Beyond personal narratives, there were also many studio photographers, fashion photographers, abstract photographers, some who focused on society, politics, spirituality, the environment, on family, on trauma and grief … This project allows us to discover so many voices and experiences that we hadn't heard, or had barely heard before. Collectively, they contribute to multiplying and complexifying the truth, the truths, about Japanese history and society. As a photography historian, and as a woman who grew up in Japan, it is a huge relief and joy to be able to see and to show Japan and the world through their eyes.
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