Panel Presentations

Panel - Behind the Camera: Recovering the History of Women as Photographers in Japan, Part I: Professionalization
Sponsored by: Japan Art History Forum

Recent scholarship has uncovered new histories of women’s participation in photography beginning with its introduction to Japan circa 1848. Yet there remains a tendency in the history of Japanese photography to think of women’s camera work as separate: its production either driven by gendered motivations or its participation limited by supposed social, physical, and technical limitations that women face. This two-part panel seeks to question this narrative, bringing to light women who were involved in the practice of photography, while addressing the practices of writing history and art history that have contributed to the continued denial of women’s lived experiences with photography.
This panel suggests that interest in women in the photographic profession is a means to re-think and re-write the history of photography to ask how it changes when photographic narratives are approached from the perspective of the women in the field. The following papers recover the history of these women by examining historical spaces of professional associations, historiography, and photo-criticism. From the Ladies Camera Club of the 1930s, to postwar “nude shooting sessions,” and the critical and curatorial breakthroughs of women in the latter half of the century, this panel seeks to better understand the gendering of the practice of photography. In the end, this panel asks why we (as a field) continue to see women professional photographers as producing work for reasons that are necessarily “other” from male counterparts.

Organizers:
Carrie Cushman, Wellesley College
Maggie Mustard, New Museum of Contemporary Art

Chair:
Karen Fraser, University of San Francisco

Paper Presenters:

Kelly Midori McCormick
“The Cameraman in a Skirt”: Tokiwa Toyoko, the Postwar Camera Boom, and the Nude Shooting Session

In this paper I critically examine the widespread though currently ignored media attention around the so-called birth of the female photographer in postwar Japan. From popularly published books to advice columns on how to succeed as a photographer I re-read the vast archive of photography magazines and weekly newspapers for their representations of women’s relationships with photography. Like the “modern girl” of the 1920s and 1903s, I see the female photographer as part media construction that many female photographers such as Tokiwa Toyoko (1930—) pushed back against in interviews and personal accounts of their work. Finally, I examine the nude shooting session (nūdo satsuekai) craze, which lasted from the late 1940s through the late 1950s, as an expression of postwar anxieties around women entering the photography profession and the social role of photography. I argue the nude shooting session should be remembered as a consequential genre of postwar Japanese photography for its role in establishing a photographic culture built upon the male gaze and address the ways in which Tokiwa commented upon this dynamic through her own representations of the event. To bring to light the women who photographed, their relationships with optical technologies, and evaluate their distinct contributions in relation to constructions of otherness, this essay looks beyond the canon to consider how materials from this alternative archive expose the values that constructed a narrative about why women were in front of or behind the lens of a camera.

Andrea Nelson
Questioning Limitations: Women Photographers in Modern Japan

While preparing for an exhibition on women photographers working during the years 1920-1955, I have been contending with a lack of information on female Japanese photographers. As I attempt to build a narrative engaged with the relationships and contributions of women photographers from around the world, I approach rewriting the history of photography into one that brings to light in a meaningful way the production and experiences of overlooked or marginalized women photographers, knowing that I need to be careful not to continue a history that genders their practice.

My paper will examine the challenges of such an endeavor by comparing the experiences and practices of two professional photographers, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Eiko Yamazawa, to the artistic practices of Michiko Yamawaki and members of the Ladies Camera Club organized by the well-known male photographer Yasuzo Nojima. I will explore the issue of limitations, that is, how to balance the real limitations these women faced on their path to becoming professional photographers and artists and the problems involved with evaluating work that has disappeared from the historical record or been deemed limited or not fully formulated. With ambition, drive, and desire, these women set out to engage with photography, yet they were set apart and othered by a number of institutions. While women were experiencing a growing liberation from traditional gender roles and opportunities for women in the field of photography were rapidly growing, this new understanding of female identity affected the daily lives of women very differently from place to place.

Jonathan Hall
Finely Social: Photo-écriture féminine and the Japanese Photography Establishment

Japanese women have played central roles not only in the creation, distribution, and exhibition of photography, but also in its critical review and curated re-presentation. My recent work documents the rise of female critical voices in male-dominated spaces of Japanese photography criticism. I begin by tracing postwar Japanese photography’s  positioning of women in four magazines: Foto Âto (1949—),Fotogurafi(1949—), Nihon Kamera(1950—), and Shashin no kyôshitsu(1951—). There, male photographers and critics offered commentary sometimes directed at women photographers, who were predominantly figured as amateur practitioners of fine art photography. I also identify the emerging space of female critical voices from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, often within the rubric of domestic “social issue” photography criticism. Yet, from the late 1980s, there has emerged a new “photo-écriture feminine” in conversation with overseas photographers as well as domestic gay male and women photographers. This writing rejected a categorical attachment to women’s work while relying upon a strategic breakdown of postwar distinctions between fine art and social issue/documentary photography. Looking at the careers of five female critics and curators—Mariko Takeuchi, Michiko Kasahara, and others, I argue that the rise of women’s photography and image criticism is linked to a refiguring of the role of photography within Japanese society and to a neoliberal privatization of the image, which that criticism often problematizes. Looking at the contexts of Japanese and international photography, my paper also incorporates results from extended interviews with women curators active today.

Panel - Behind the Camera: Recovering the History of Women as Photographers in Japan, Panel II-Subjectivities
Sponsored by: Japan Art History Forum

Recent scholarship has uncovered new histories of women’s participation in photography beginning with its introduction to Japan circa 1848. Yet there remains a tendency in the history of Japanese photography to think of women’s camera work as separate: its production either driven by gendered motivations or its participation limited by supposed social, physical, and technical limitations that women face. This two-part panel seeks to question this narrative, bringing to light women who were involved in the practice of photography while addressing the practices of writing history and art history that have contributed to the continued denial of women’s lived experiences with photography.

This panel focuses on the specific subjectivities of women photographers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan, presenting intersectional analyses of these artists’ artworks, their biographies, and the way in which they have been accepted into or excluded from extant canons of Japanese photographic history. These case studies will show that including women in a history of photography opens up onto broader conversations of othering and diversity of experience within Japan, whether that be via race, sexuality, health/illness, age, or access to traditional spaces of training and professionalization. By bringing to light the stories of female photographers, this panel aims to intervene into the practices of writing history and to understand how we can move forward and examine long-held assumptions on the limitations of women in the field.

Organizers:
Kelly Midori McCormick, UCLA
Carrie Cushman, Wellesley College

Chair:
Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv University

Paper Presenters:

Daryl Maude
An Archive of Gazes: Race and Intimacy in the Photography of Ishikawa Mao

Ishikawa Mao’s 1975 series of photographs of African American servicemen in Okinawa depict them at their leisure, interacting with Okinawan and Japanese women in bars, homes, and public spaces. Wanting to take photographs of Americans, she got work in bars serving the soldiers, documenting them and the Okinawan and Japanese wives and girlfriends. In contrast to other photographers of the Occupation, such as Ishikawa’s teacher, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Ishikawa lived and worked among her subjects, becoming intimately acquainted with them.

This paper takes Ishikawa’s photographs as an important portrayal of interracial, cross-gender intimacy just three years after Okinawa’s Reversion to Japanese control. It explores the meaning and significance of these intimacies in the context of Okinawa, with its colonial and imperial relations to Japan and the USA. This article’s reading of Ishikawa’s photographs, coupled with her commentary on them and the racial situation in Okinawa at the time, build a complex picture of interracial tension and intimacy in Japan, Okinawa, American Empire, and the Asia Pacific region in the 1970s. Drawing on theories of race, gender, and visuality, this paper treats Ishikawa’s photographs as an “archive of gazes:” important objects to think about the interactions between the viewing subject and the viewed object.

James Welker
Photojournalist, Pornographer, Outlaw: Kiyooka Sumiko, Radical Woman Photographer in Postwar Japan

Kiyooka Sumiko (1921–1991) was many things: daughter of Kyoto nobility, aspiring nun, fiction writer and poet, and, starting in 1968, groundbreaking author of nine books about lesbians in Japan. She was also a wartime photojournalist, a documentary photographer, and either an art photographer or pornographer, depending on how her work is assessed.

Kiyooka’s photographs of women identified as lesbians accompanied her lesbian books—books and photos that often seem aimed simultaneously at a lesbian audience and the male gaze. While she identified herself as a “cameraman,” eschewing an artistic assessment of her work, similarities between some of these photographs and contemporary photographs of “lesbians” by Araki Nobuyoshi suggest she sought to produce erotic art photography rather than merely document lesbian experience. Unlike Araki, however, her photos were taken from a lesbian perspective.

Further, in 1977, Kiyooka began producing books of “Lolita” photography—erotic photos of pubescent and adolescent girls—that would later be classified as child pornography and banned. Her status as a “doyenne” of Lolita photography was recognized in Shashin jidai, a vehicle for Araki, Moriyama Daidō, and other prominent male photographers to publish erotic photos, alongside landscapes, portraiture, and abstract photography. In an interview in that magazine, Kiyooka noted that her being a woman made her young female subjects more comfortable than would a male photographer.
In this paper I complicate the history of women in photography by considering, via Kiyooka’s life and work, how women have contributed to less seemly arenas of photography in Japan.

Maggie Mustard
Knowing Themselves: Woman Photographers Exploring the Body and Trauma in Contemporary Japan

Iizawa Kotarо’s controversial characterization of the work of late twentieth-century women photographers as onnanoko shashin (“girls’ photography”) is partially founded on the way in which private spheres of the photographer’s life are made public through her artistic practice. This paper—analyzing the work of contemporary photographers Okabe Momo and Anrakuji Emi—will ask what changes when access to these private spheres is predicated on female photographers challenging us to witness the trauma of their own bodies.

Okabe’s Bible (2014) and Anrakuji’s HMMT? (2005) are documents of trauma and bodily transformation: the former an exploration of Okabe’s intimate circle of friends undergoing gender confirmation surgeries set against the backdrop of the 2011 Tо̄hoku earthquake and tsunami, while the latter is a somatic mapping informed by Anrakuji’s decade-long confinement to her bed following a brain tumor diagnosis and near-total loss of sight.

“Unflinching,” is the word most often used to describe Okabe’s photography, while Anrakuji’s work is frequently characterized as “unsettling,” or “disorienting”—yet both of these photographers are praised for the way in which their work invites an intimacy not unlike that in Iizawa’s version of “girls’ photography.” Keeping in mind that Ninagawa Mika has characterized the so-called onnanoko shashin as an artistic moment where she and her work were “easily consumed,” this paper will explore how the traumatized and/or transformed body—photographed and made accessible by the woman herself—may present a paradox: resisting easy consumption, but requiring the confession of violence, loss, or suffering in order to be taken seriously.

Dan Abbe
The Contingencies of Recovery: Masuyama Tazuko and Photography’s Canons

In an essay on Eugène Atget’s work, Abigail Solomon-Godeau claimed that “even for those who espouse it, a canon is never eternal, is always dynamic, and is always—literally—man-made.” By criticizing the patriarchal relationship between authors and canons, Solomon-Godeau pointed to the gendered conditions under which the history of photography has been written. This panel returns to Solomon-Godeau’s line of thought, and raises the question of how to recover a history of women in photography that would not make them into canonical figures. In this paper, I will consider the possibilities of recovering Masuyama Tazuko, an amateur photographer from Gifu Prefecture. Masuyama first took up the camera in 1977, at the age of 61, when a dam construction project that would flood her hometown of Tokuyama was approved. From that point, she photographed her village as thoroughly as possible before it disappeared; she photographed it consistently until her death in 2006, leaving behind tens of thousands of photographs in personal photo albums. This archive has the potential to extend the scope of art historical inquiry beyond professionalized “art photography”—a domain whose history, in Japan as elsewhere, has been populated almost exclusively by men. After introducing Masuyama, I will raise broader questions about our own work: on what terms should Masuyama be recovered, to what histories of photography does she belong? How might the construction of her work shape the way we construct our own histories?

Individual Presentations

Infrastructure Comes Alive: Miyamoto Ryūji’s Photographs of Kowloon Walled City
Paper Presenter: Carrie Cushman, Wellesley College

In the booming field of infrastructure studies, infrastructure has been framed as a provocative site of inquiry for its material vanishings: infrastructures are hidden, operating behind the scenes, and, therefore, taken for granted. In this perspective, the smooth operation of infrastructure in the “developed” city constitutes its invisibility. However, as scholars of the Global South and peripheral urbanization have shown, infrastructures are also sites of contestation, environment making, and political action. Infrastructures are, therefore, emphatically visible.

This paper examines the visualization of infrastructure through the medium of photography as a starting point for considering potential outcomes of what Brian Larkin calls the poetic mode of infrastructure. What happens when infrastructure is detached from its original function via its representation in photographs, or loosed from its material context in the space of the art gallery? How can infrastructure-as-image come to represent a population, create new urban imaginaries, or define alternate ways of being in the world? I take the Japanese photographer Miyamoto Ryūji’s representations of infrastructure from the notorious Hong Kong slum, Kowloon Walled City, as a case study to show how entrenched biological metaphors for infrastructure make its material compositions amenable to narratives of human resilience, creativity, and agency. The historical and visual analysis of Miyamoto’s prolific photographs of Kowloon in the final years before its demolition reveals how the visual affect of infrastructure operates on diverse actors who continue to speak for the Walled City’s former population and condition its existence.