Through the Lens of Japan’s Most Visionary Women Photographers
Internationally, Japanese photography has been represented largely by men — Moriyama, Araki, Sugimoto. This exhibition sets out to rethink and expand that canon. Built around a 2024 book of the same name, edited by Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, it gathers Japanese women photographers who have shaped the medium since the 1950s. The show has had a high-profile tour since debuting at France’s Rencontres d’Arles, passing through The Hague and Frankfurt to The Photographer’s Gallery in London, where it runs until late September — with New York’s International Center of Photography to follow in October.
Its Japan homecoming, organized by Bunkamura, is the largest version yet: 30 photographers — four of them added for Tokyo — and roughly 200 works. Among them are Toshiko Okanoue, who spliced surreal photo collages out of imported fashion magazines back in the 1950s, and Miwa Yanagi, whose iconic Elevator Girls series depicts uniformed attendants in haunting, labyrinthine retail spaces. Rinko Kawauchi finds small, luminous moments in the texture of ordinary life, while Aya Fujioka — one of the Tokyo additions — turns her lens on present-day Hiroshima, letting the city’s atomic past flow quietly beneath the everyday in her series Here Goes River.
Read our full review of the exhibition here.
