Women were long absent from the Japanese photography scene. Kyoto's International Festival of Photography is now dedicating a special exhibition to their work.
Protesting prejudice: women carrying placards featuring pictures of cancer survivorsImage: Aimie Eliot
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Japan through the eyes of women photographers
Kyotographie, a Kyoto photography festival, celebrates its 10th edition by shedding light on female Japanese photography. Taboos, prejudices, gender boundaries but also environmental issues are topics of the works.
Image: Ai Iwane
'Zaido'
Devastated by a series of tragic accidents, Yukari Chikura followed a dream in which her deceased father appeared, asking her to go to a remote village in Tohoku. There she took part in a 1,300-year-old festival called Zaido, capturing it with her camera. "Seeing people fight again and again to preserve heritage gave me the courage to live again," she said of the experience.
Image: Yukari Chikura
'Sawasawato'
From 1959-84, around 93,000 people left Japan for North Korea as part of a repatriation program. Some 1,800 were Japanese women who had married Korean men. Noriko Hayashi portrays these women in her series "sawasawato." "I visited these elderly women, interviewed them, and took photos. I traced their memories as I traveled back and forth between Japan and North Korea," Hayashi (above) said.
Image: Noriko Hayashi
'New Skin'
Mayumi Hosokura's digital collages compose a new world where distinctions of sex are dissolved. Her works use her past photos of male nudes and male museum sculptures, as well as selfies found on the internet and magazine pictures. "Not only in artworks but in our daily lives, gender might be a bit more neutral and connected closer," Hosokura commented.
Image: Mayumi Hosokura
'Eagle and Raven'
After a trip to Iceland, where she was fascinated by water landscapes and their unique lights, Ariko Inaoka started to photograph twin sisters she had met there, returning every year for eight years. They became her muses: "They told me ... 'We dream the same dreams together.' They made me think that even though we don't dream the same in our sleep, we share the same dreams," Inaoka said.
Image: Ariko Inaoka
'A New River'
When the cherry blossom viewings that usually take place each spring in Japan were cancelled due to COVID, Ai Iwane captured the trees blooming in the dark. Her photos reflect the ambiguous borders between nature and human: "When I walk under the cherry blossoms in the dark, I often hear the voice of wild animals … the boundaries between human and nature became blurred," the artist explained.
Image: Ai Iwane
'Ilmatar'
Momo Okabe's series Ilmatar — the name of a Finnish goddess of air — is inspired by her own experience. Okabe, who considers herself asexual, became pregnant through IVF. As fertility treatments become standard, she believes the process is worth recording: "Impossible things happen ... If we pay more attention to such things, and photograph them, life would be even more beautiful."
Image: Momo Okabe
'Mutation / Creation'
Harumi Shimizu's series documents human fascination with mutations. Her work, an inventory of animal and vegetable strangeness, sublimates the weirdness and questions the concept of beauty: "People have long responded to mutant animals and plants. This kind of curiosity is universal to some extent. I want to know more about [it] ... so I collect these mysterious things and take pictures of them."
Image: Harumi Shimizu
'Hojo'
In "Hojo," Mayumi Suzuki uses her personal experience of undergoing infertility treatment to talk about the complexity of women's bodies. "When I went to the market when after I gave up, I found … all these odd-shaped unsold things. I thought they were just like me. I wanted to express this vague feeling with my own body," Suzuki said.
Image: Mayumi Suzuki
'Die of love'
Hideka Tonomura explores relationship intimacy through blurry and sensorial pictures, thereby depicting her own "theater of love." Photography became cathartic for her while she was dealing with traumatic experiences: "I kept shooting to live, to keep me alive." Tonomura also initiated the Shining Woman Project, which sheds light on women fighting cancer and combats the prejudices they face.
Image: Hideka Tonomura
'Negative ecology'
In Tamaki Yoshida's pictures, stunning landscapes and wild animals from the island of Hokkaido are eroded by detergents, shampoos and other chemicals contaminating water and environment. "I always believe the animal world and human world are both equal. Rather than invading or being invaded, it is best to coexist symbiotically. I think humans are capable of that," Yoshida commented.
Image: Tamashi Yoshida
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Kyoto's International Festival of Photography, Kyotographie, is not only for museums and galleries; over four weeks in the spring, photography invades the entire city with exhibitions held in various iconic sites, including a Buddhist temple, a busy shopping street and the house of Genbei Yamaguchi, a 10th-generation artisan of traditional kimonos and obis.
When Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi launched the festival 10 years ago, they had one goal: celebrate photography and give the medium the space it deserved.
According to the festival organizers, photography still struggles to be recognized and valued in Japan, so their goal with Kyotographie is to put the medium on the same level as the traditional arts: "Japan can be very strict and quite old-school in the way they are thinking about art, everything is categorized … we wanted to break that," festival co-founder Yusuke Nakanishi told DW.
The event features international masters of photography and new talents, a combination purposely designed"to get people interested in what they know less about," says Lucille Reyboz.
Kyotographie now also aims to become a springboard for Japanese female artists: "In 10 years, we have seen more and more female artists coming up," points out Reyboz, so they used the festival's growing acclaim to finally put them in the spotlight.
"For a long time, we have observed Japan through the eyes of men. And it's as if we haven't looked at it completely,"says Pauline Vermare, a photography historian and co-curator of the festival's special exhibition, "10/10 Celebrating Contemporary Japanese Women Photographers."
Highlighting the work of 10 Japanese artists, the exhibition held at the Hosoo art gallery is like a "manifesto for women photographers in Japan,"according to co-founder Lucille Reyboz.
The Kyotographie event is hosted in various iconic sites in Kyoto, including this traditional wooden houseImage: Aimie Eliot
Photos reflecting women's struggles
The disappearance of traditional culture, nature threatened by humans, gender boundaries: Social and environmental issues are central in these photographers' work.
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An important part of the exhibition addresses the challenges affecting women in particular. The artists denounce the taboos and prejudices they have to deal with.
For example, through self-portraits and metaphoric still-lives, Mayumi Suzuki deals with her infertility treatment, "an issue that we don't talk about in Japan," she says.
Photojournalist Noriko Hayashi documents the unheard voices of Japanese women married to Korean husbands who migrated to North Korea and could never return.
Hideka Tonomura shows a series of portraits women mutilated by cancer:"There is too much of a tendency to judge women according to their body and women get a lot of prejudice when they lose their female body parts," says the artist.
Using the festival as a megaphone, the photographer organized a parade to express the beauty of these women. She invited her models to march in the street with their picture as placards. "Even if you have lost female parts of your body, you are still shining; we are all survivors and we all deserve to live freely," she told the participants in an emotional speech.
The women's struggles that are addressed in the photos echo the obstacles also faced by the photographers as artists: "In Japan, they don't have enough space to express themselves, they can't say what they think because if they do so they are perceived like being too strong, to pretentious," says photographer Yukari Chikura.
"I hope in the future we won't have to focus on saying that we are female photographers," she adds. "But right now, it is symbolizing the gender gap that still exists between women and men."
She hopes that one day, this distinction will no longer be needed — when gender equality will have finally been achieved.
