October 6, 2015–February 21, 2016
at the Getty Center
Self-taught photographer Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, born 1947) stunned the Japanese photography establishment in the late 1970s with grainy, haunting, black-and-white images of Yokosuka— the city where Ishiuchi spent her childhood and where the United States established an important naval base in 1945. Fusing the personal and political in her work, Ishiuchi interweaves her identity with the complex history of postwar Japan that emerged from "shadows" cast by American occupation. Presenting photographs made over the last forty years, this exhibition includes Ishiuchi's most recent series, ひろしま/hiroshima, seventy years after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Several young Japanese photographers garnered attention in the 1990s, when their bold, colorful, often provocative pictures of themselves and their immediate worlds were collectively dubbed "girl photographs." This exhibition celebrates the emergence of five talented female photographers from Japan whose careers began in the 1990s and 2000s—Kawauchi Rinko, Onodera Yuki, Otsuka Chino, Sawada Tomoko, and Shiga Lieko. Selected series by these artists evoke the influence of Ishiuchi Miyako, whose work is showcased in the companion exhibitionIshiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows.
