Japanese Women Photographers: From the ’50s to the ’80s

Women & Their Work presented Japanese Women Photographers: From the ’50s to the ’80s at the RGK Foundation, 2815 San Gabriel. The exhibition featured 80 photographs by 8 women artists who lived in Japan. Japanese Women Photographers was curated by Tatsuo Fukushima and Hans Fleischner and organized by Lehigh University Art Gallery in Pennsylvania. The exhibition provided an overview of the development of photography in Japan over a 30-year period and the evolution of Japan itself as it had moved to an urban, industrial and increasingly Westernized society. Photographers included Mizuha Fukushima, Hisae Irnai, Miyako Ishuichi, Sachiko Kuru, Michiko Kon, Yoshino Ohishi, Kazuko Yajirna, and Eiko Yarnazawa.

The exhibit included works which showed a wide variety of philosophies, styles, and techniques. Photographers ranged from the ground-breaking veteran Eiko Yamazawa, who graduated in 1918 from the Tokyo Women’s Art School and established numerous important studios of photography in Japan, to Mizuha Fukushima, 26, who held her first solo exhibition in Tokyo in the same year as this exhibition.

Other photographers included in the exhibit were Hisae Imai, famous for her treatment of the horse theme; Shchiko Kuru, who had been censured for her elegant and exotic photography; Michiko Kon, who published her first photography book, Eat, in the same year; Kazuko Yajima, whose work had often been shown in slide performances; Yoshino Ohishi, who had received wide international exposure for her treatment of humanistic themes; and Miyako Ishiuchi, who had recently exhibited in New York and Hamburg.