Harachikei | The Miracle of the Gaze: Adventures of Japanese Women Photographers
Harachikei reviews the Tokyo exhibition of 30 Japanese women photographers, organized in four thematic chapters.Summary
The exhibition stems from the 2024 Aperture publication "I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now" and the group show at the Rencontres d'Arles, and its Tokyo iteration adds four photographers—Imai Hisae, Iwane Ai, Fujioka Aya, and Yoneda Tomoko—for a total of 30 artists. Rather than organizing by chronology, it structures works across four chapters—"the diversity of the photographic medium," "document and memory," "gender, body, sexuality," and "the everyday"—to connect practices from different eras. By placing figures such as Okanoue Toshiko and Yamazawa Eiko alongside Yurie Nagashima, HIROMIX, Mika Ninagawa, Watanabe Hitomi, Tokiwa Toyoko, and Miyako Ishiuchi in the same space, it seeks new continuities among works long discussed in isolation. At the same time, the review notes that foregrounding gender to make women photographers visible risks repeating, in another form, the history of labels like "joryū shashinka" and "girl photography," and that the show can feel as though it treats women as a mystified, pure object. It highlights the chronology in the final section, which begins with Yamazawa's pioneering activity and aligns social and photographic history on a single timeline, showing that the exhibition aims not to regroup women photographers by gender but to make visible the differences among their practices. The review assesses the exhibition as an ongoing, tentative practice still taking shape.
(Source：artscape)