Reclaiming women’s place in Japanese photography

I’m So Happy You Are Here, a travelling exhibition and accompanying book, showcases seminal works by Japanese women photographers from the 1950s onward, underscoring their often overlooked contributions. Published by Aperture, it features 25 portfolios, an illustrated bibliography curated by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and essays from a range of writers, including Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick. Ahead of the exhibition at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany, Roula Seikaly speaks with curators Lesley A. Martin, Pauline Vermare and Takeuchi Mariko about their expansive collaboration, key works that informed the project and the importance of centring individual women’s stories in Japanese photographic history.


Roula Seikaly | Interview |  7 May 2025

Once in a while,

we should look into each other’s eyes.

Otherwise we might feel lost.

I’m so glad you are here.

Kawauchi Rinko, from the eyes, the ears

Roula Seikaly: Could you describe the state of research or scholarship addressing photography by Japanese women as you found it when this project started?

Pauline Vermare: There were projects about Japanese women photographers made before this one. The most famous is An Incomplete History: Women Photographers from Japan 18641997 (Traveling Exhibition Service, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, 1998) by curator Fuku Noriko. She was researching the who’s who of Japanese photography and came to the same realisation as we did; there were no women to be found in there. Noriko told me about Japanese Women Photographers from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, which was curated by Fukushima Tatsuo and Hans Fleishner and organised by Ricardo Viera at Lehigh University Art Galleries in 1986, that wasn’t well known at all. Viera organised that exhibition after cancelling another exhibition on experimental Japanese photography, when the male Japanese photographers in that show protested the inclusion of work by women. I love that this was his reaction. In Japan, a group of artists including Ishiuchi Miyako curated the all-women exhibition Hyakka ryoran (One hundred flowers in bloom) at Shimizu Gallery in Yokohama in 1974.

It’s very important to note that this project doesn’t come out of nowhere. In Japan, many curators and historians such as Kasahara Michiko and Takeuchi Mariko have written and researched extensively on the subject, and promoted the work of Japanese women photographers, as have Kelly McCormick and Carrie Cushman in the United States. That’s why Lesley and I, as editors of the book, invited them to be part of this project. We knew that the research had been done for years and years.

Lesley A. Martin: As Pauline mentioned, this project served as a catalyst for bringing together a tremendous fount of research that had already been undertaken. I think that was really one of the most rewarding aspects of this project – to be able to tap into work that people had already been doing independently and to give it a larger context. It was an act of gathering rather than discovery. We wanted to unite the many dedicated voices of scholars and gallerists and curators who had been doing this work on their own, of their own volition. This echoes, in some ways, the history of women photographers who were so committed to their own practice that they continued their work regardless of recognition or available platforms.

RS: Is it important that audiences know Japanese photo history before they experience this project?

Takeuchi Mariko: This is exactly what we talked when we started this project. We really wanted to make it open to everybody. So, this is not just for people familiar with Japanese photography.

LAM: There is a very committed audience in the West for Japanese photography, but we wanted to make sure that the book that could function as a way into all this amazing work by women, no matter how much experience one had with the history of photography in Japan. First and foremost, it is informed by the circumstances and the social situation of Japanese women – their lived experiences. What’s been really rewarding is that we’ve gotten enthusiastic responses from people who say, “I didn’t know anything about Japanese photography”, as well as from those who do really know the history.

PV: Charlotte Cotton’s Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015) was an inspiration as a playful yet serious invitation to contemporary photography – in this case Japanese photography specifically, which can be a loaded subject. We address that complexity in the essays. I’m So Happy You Are Here is layered: the essays, the illustrated bibliography that Russet Lederman and Marc Feustel put together, the portfolios, all of that combined is designed to address the depth of the subject.

RS: Why is the period 1950 to 2000 an important framing device for this book? 

LAM: Originally, we had the subtitle as Japanese Women Photographers from 1880 to Now. The history begins with the medium’s introduction to Japan. We include essays and reference materials that trace women’s participation from the boom of the earliest, often family-run photo studios in Japan, through the Meiji and Taisho eras, to today. Once we started to focus on the portfolios, we realised that what we really wanted to explore began in the 1950s onward.

PV: I came to this project from Une Histoire Mondiale des Femmes Photographes (Textuel, 2020) and originally thought about a book covering the late 1880s to now. A few years prior, Lesley and Mariko had discussed a book about Japanese women photographers from the ‘90s. But we liked Lesley’s idea to articulate the book around those 25 portfolios, and these photographers had all worked from the ‘50s on. We realised that an encyclopaedic methodology would not work as well for what we wanted to achieve. But the essays do a great job laying out what came before, noting where these photographers came from. We start with Shima Ryū, the first known Japanese woman photographer.

TM: There are a lot of stories, a lot of photographers before the ‘50s, of course. But, to make the best project, the decision to pursue portfolios made the most sense.

PV: I think it did. Mariko’s essay emphasises the importance of experimentation and how these artists pushed boundaries. We needed that to be present in the portfolios as well.

We wanted to show the breadth of the styles and generations and contributions, from classic black and white documentary, like Tokiwa Toyoko, through the post-war era to today’s experimentations, like Tawada Yuki. Because those experimentations, as Mariko writes so beautifully in her essay, mean something beyond the work itself. Something psychological and sociological that needed to be conveyed as well.

TM: As we said, this is not a dictionary. This is not a book just about history. We really wanted to tell stories of individual women. This is not just about Japan. It’s really about individual lives with photography.

LAM: Pauline and I recently had a conversation with Carrie Cushman, who mentioned that as a western scholar in Japan, it has been difficult to get access to some of the research materials. And it was difficult for us to get some of the illustrations for their essay because the materials just aren’t well-digitised, it turns out. I think that also served to shift our focus: the ease of access to the images themselves.

RS: Pauline describes feminism as an incomplete construct through which to understand the book and the portfolios it contains. Has feminism been elevated sort of as a central issue by audiences you’ve experienced so far? How have you addressed that?

PV: As a French woman who grew up in Japan, now living in New York, I struggled with the fact that ‘feminism’ means different things in each of these countries. France and Japan might be closer, in terms of societal structures and gender roles. I felt that our analysis would be too limited, not inclusive enough, if we only looked at the work of these photographers through an American feminist lens. I quote a few photographers in my introduction. Someone like Nagashima Yurie, who studied abroad at some point, in LA, was very interested in the notion of feminism and worked around it in her own way. For others, especially of the generation of Ishiuchi or Sugiura, women who are now in their 70s or 80s, feminism wasn’t the focus. They didn’t want to talk about it. It was a bit of a rejection, at least of the word ‘feminism’. I love what Mariko said, that it’s about individual lives. I think that angle is much more open and fruitful than an approach that would be theoretically or sociologically locking their work in a box.

LAM: We came from very different perspectives on this as an editorial committee. (The editorial committee being myself, Pauline, Mariko, Carrie and Kelly.) Carrie and Kelly would describe their practice as adamantly driven by feminist ideas around the retelling of history. Each of us occupy a different position on how feminism intersects with the act of writing a restorative history. From my personal perspective, I would also argue that it’s unavoidably feminist.

RS: Where did this project start? Was it a collaboration from the beginning?

PV: On my end, it started with a masterclass on Japanese women photographers that the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris invited me to give, which was prompted by a few articles I had contributed to Luce Lebart and Marie Robert’s book published by Textuel in 2020. The Textuel team, whom I had been discussing this project with, knew that Lesley had been working with Mariko on a project focusing on the 1990s, and kindly connected us.

LAM: That’s how I learned that Pauline had been researching this topic. She and I both lived in Japan at different times in our lives. I was there from ‘92-95 after finishing my undergraduate degree and very attuned to dialogues around feminism and culture at the time. I was very impressed by some of the work that I had seen emerging in Tokyo, in particular Nagashima Yurie, Ninagawa Mika, Hiromix. These three artists represented a watershed moment when Japanese women were really coming to the forefront. That stayed with me.

I met Mariko in 2005 or 2006. When I could finally turn my focus to this project, I knew that she was a great resource and someone that I wanted to work with. In 2017, we began a conversation around a book that would just focus on women in the 1990s. Another important collaborator to that conversation was the photographer Nagashima Yurie, who asked all the right questions. I came to realise that the ‘90s is a very important time period, but also really complicated. Making a book that introduced that one historical moment came to feel like releasing a tiny slice of something into the vacuum around a much larger history. Mariko, Yurie and I spent a lot of time talking about what was missing. And it’s thanks to those conversations that the multivalency of the project really crystallised. COVID slowed everything down, but it also gave us time to find Pauline!

Mariko, is that an accurate description? Because you did a lot of work on that earlier project.

TM: The three of us were on different paths but realised that we were running in the same direction. It was very natural process. I researched women photographers in Japan for a long time. I wrote texts and gave lectures and did shows with some women photographers. After doing the work alone, I feel so fortunate to work with these two. It’s a kind of a miracle for me to realise this.

RS: The care you have for one another as colleagues, as friends, as people invested in this topic really comes through in the book, as does the care for the artists and the work in this project. The world is a terrible place and has been for a long time. For me, spending time with the book and speaking with all of you, it’s very heartening. The book is unapologetically welcoming and driven by love and appreciation, things that we seem collectively low in our reserves right now.

PV: Thank you, Roula, this is so good to hear. This project was driven by a desire to counterbalance what you’re talking about, everything we’ve been going through, and photography is very much a way to do that. The title, I’m So Happy You Are Here, is from a poem by photographer Kawauchi Rinko (published in the eyes, the ears, 2010).  Last year, at the Gordon Parks Foundation gala, Colin Kaepernick was being honoured, and he gave a deeply inspiring speech, saying that we all needed to “open the windows”. And I thought, this is the most beautiful thing to say. And that’s what I think we wanted to do with the project.

RS: Why was Aperture the right publisher for this project? Did their participation signal institutional approval or support for projects like this?

PV: Lesley was Aperture’s creative director at the time and had been working with Japanese photographers for many years. I would say it was a mission for her, a personal commitment she was carrying through. And Aperture, as we know, has always been on the forefront of groundbreaking projects like this one, including Photography is Magic, The Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (2019) and The Chinese Photobook (2015). It was clear that this is where this book belonged, in that group.

RS: Readers are likely to be interested in seeing more work by the artists featured in the portfolios and the illustrated bibliography. Are there websites – artist websites, museum and exhibition websites, archives, translated books – that readers can refer to? 

PV: Kelly Midori McCormick and Carrie Cushman’s online platform Behind the Camera is a very impressive and important history of Japanese women’s photographers. You could spend hours on it, going through all the bios and chronology. It is a fascinating and extremely valuable resource.

There are also the hundreds of photobooks made by Japanese women, including the ones that Marc and Russet gathered in their bibliography. I am thinking also of a few books made recently by Chose Commune, the French publisher, including Kawauchi, Hara Mikiko and Kodama Kusako.

And we are hoping the project will trigger other publications, including a translation of Nagashima Yurie’s very important book “Bokura” no “onna no ko shashin” kara watashitachi no girlie photo e Yurie Nagashima (Daifuku Shorin, 2020) that is partially translated in our book for the first time.

RS: If there were any challenges in realising this project, what were they and how did you address them?

TM: Ah, so many challenges. I always think that the challenge is good, though.

As you know, I’m based in Japan. And I am so familiar with a so-called Japanese mentality and idea of photography. I was aware that I needed to push the boundaries. I’ve been working on Japanese photography abroad a lot, and feel like I’ve always worked in between, like I have to explain it to both sides. But I enjoy it. I do it because I believe in it.

PV: The main challenge I would say was cultural. How to approach this subject in the most universal way. Nagashima Yurie was asking important questions, about gender and social class in Japan. What does it mean to be Japanese, what does it mean to be a woman, what is “a Japanese woman”? But we knew where we were going, and we were all going in the same direction, with the same intention. That fed the whole project and drove it to its destination.

RS: Thinking about the medium’s historiography, how it’s taught, and about the blind spots that you’ve spoken to throughout this interview, how would you like this book to be used? Do you see it as a textbook? How would you like the work of these artists incorporated into the wider photo canon, if at all?

MT: This book is open, welcoming everyone from different approaches. It can be used in any way. Not just in classrooms, but as a visual source for historians and for students. My wish is to hand it to everyone, that’s all.

PV: I see this book is a conduit. It would be wonderful to see it being used in classrooms, to trigger optimism and creativity in students, to empower them. As a student, you want to be pushed in a direction that’s new, that will open something inside of you. That could become a lifelong thing. I would love for Japanese and Asian studies programs in the US and France to use it. I feel like people would know and understand so much more about Japan just by looking at the work of those photographers and reading about their experiences.

I open my essay with this quote by Annie Ernaux: ‘My story as a woman is not only a woman’s story’. This project is about adding vantage points and perspectives to the story. I think it is fundamental to open the field of vision, to see the reverse shots, the counter views. We go back to opening the windows. Sometimes, we fail to look at, or to even think that there’s another way of looking at the story. And for me, this is the goal of this project: to say, let’s look at these other perspectives.

TM: That’s a very crucial point. And that reminds me of our conversation, Pauline. When we started, you asked me what I would want to prioritise for this project, and I replied that I just want to break the cliche stereotype of Japanese women – always smiling, soft, nice, and never saying no. I’m really fed up with this. As you can see in the book, each of us are brave, individual and independent.♦

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now runs at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany, from 24 May–7 September 2025 and is published by Aperture.


Lesley A. Martin is Executive Director of Printed Matter and former Creative Director of Aperture.

Takeuchi Mariko is a writer, critic and curator of photography, and head of the art studies programmme at Kyoto University of the Arts.

Roula Seikaly is a curatorwriter and co-founder of Print Study for All. Seikaly’s curatorial projects have been hosted at venues across the US, including Berkeley Art Center, Colorado Photographic Arts Center and SF Camerawork. Her writing has been published through KQED Arts, Hyperallergic and Photograph.

Pauline Vermare is the Philip and Edith Lenonian Curator of Photography at Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Images:

1-Asako Narahashi, Kawaguchiko, 2003; from the series half awake and half asleep in the water. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

2-Eiko Yamazawa, What I Am Doing No. 77, 1986. Courtesy Third Gallery Aya, Osaka, and Aperture

3-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled, 1968–69; from the series Tōdai Zenkyōtō. Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

4-Michiko Kon, Inada + Bōshi (Yellowtail and hat), 1986. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

5-Lieko Shiga, Mother’s Gentle Hands; from the series Rasen Kaigan, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

6-Mikiko Hara, Untitled, 1996. Courtesy Osiris Co., Ltd., Tokyo, and Aperture

7-Miwa Yanagi, Elevator Girl House 1F, 1997; from the series Elevator Girl. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

8-Miyako Ishiuchi, mother’s #39, 2002. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

9-Momo Okabe, Untitled, 2020; from the series Ilmatar. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

10-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2004; from the series the eyes, the ears. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

11-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997; from the series Hiroki. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

12-Tamiko Nishimura, Mitaka, Tokyo, 1978; from the series Zoku (My Journey II). Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

13-Tokuko Ushioda, Untitled, 1983; from the series My Husband. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

14-Yurie Nagashima, Full-figured, yet not full-term, 2001. Courtesy the artist, Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture


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Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024

For the 55th time, Arles, the historic Roman city in southern France, hosts the prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles, where municipal buildings are transformed to showcase the visual legacies of photographers and artists worldwide. This year’s theme, Beneath the Surface, explores narratives that uncover divergent paths, often revealing vulnerabilities in seemingly impermeable facades. As expected, the festival boasts its usual grandeur, meticulous organisation, and impressive works by renowned artists. Yet, as Mark Durden writes, it is the traditional photographic approaches that retain a profound impact amidst the festival’s exploration of new directions in the medium.


Mark Durden | Festival review | 11 July 2024 | In association with MPB

Sophie Calle’s exhibition of some of her own artworks and possessions are left to rot in the subterranean Cryptoporticus in Arles, offering a great contrast to the clamouring image spectacle of the very festival of which it is part. On discovering one of her favourite works, The Blind, had become toxic through mould spores after her studio was damaged in a storm, and refusing to follow the restorer’s suggestion that it should be destroyed, Calle decided to exhibit it (together with other works that had been contaminated and objects from her life that she no longer had any use for but could not throw away) in a humid and underground place where its degradation could continue. Calle’s show, in this respect, offers a mini retrospective, a darkly comic counterpoint to the grandiosity of more spectacular displays above ground, and a reminder of the ultimate and inevitable mortality of art and the artist. When I viewed her exhibition, water was constantly dripping upon large framed black-and-white prints of graves, laid on the floor.

This year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles is marked by a schism between those who work against photography, those who deploy it through montage in installations and those who less ostentatiously explore its intrinsic properties. Calle works against photography, but knowingly and comedically, clearly relishing the correspondence between her decaying pictures and their sepulchral and funerary setting.

In the impressive interior of the 15th century Gothic Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel’s flagship show’s magical realist response to the migration route across Mexico to the US, with its overblown and enigmatic combinations of pictorial elements, objects, archival material and Mexican lotería card imagery (this game of chance, presumably there to bring in an iconography related to Mexico and imply the journey of migrants is a lottery and up to fate) muddles the clarity of reportage and seemingly relishes the resultant ambiguity. The US’ brutal migrant policy and murderous exploitation by cartels through both people and drug trafficking (nothing to do with chance) becomes a cue to a fantastical tale, modelled on Jules Verne’s science fiction Journey to the Centre of the World (1864). The problem with such a spectacular display is that it is hard to engage and relate to what is going on as images collide and compete for attention. If montage was originally intended to be critically dialectical and produce new meaning, the danger here is that things become all too uncertain.

Mary Ellen Mark, who is given a significant and engaging retrospective at Espace Van Gogh, valorises an older, humanist documentary tradition; her 1987 portrait of the Damm family in the car in which they were living at the time, is in some ways her “Migrant Mother”. Perhaps it is not so obsolete as de Middel’s pop documentary display might suggest. The real goes beyond our imagination, and is always full of surprises. Photographers like Mark are attuned to this and bring it out again and again in many of their extraordinary pictures. In her powerful, colourful, somewhat voyeuristic depictions of sex workers in Mumbai, she may be outside but the sense is that she pictures more from the inside and in affinity with these women.                                                                                                                                                   At the Palais de L’Archevêché, I’m So Happy You Are Here, Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare, was a welcome change and far cry from the continued celebration of such male Japanese photographers as Daido Moriyama and their fixation on women as subject. But with so many photographers on show, 26, it only functions as a taster. I would have liked to have seen more work by Mari Katayama. Born with tibial hemimelia, which caused the bones in her lower legs and left hand to be undeveloped, and having decided to amputate her legs at the age of nine, the young artist sees herself as ‘one of the raw materials to use in my work’ in extraordinary self-portraits with hand-sewn prostheses.

Ishiuchi Miyako, recipient of the Women in Motion Award, as well as showing in I’m So Happy, is given a solo show at the Salle Henri-Comte, presenting photographs of objects and possessions remaining after death: her mother’s used lipstick, her lingerie, her hairbrush tangled with her hair, her dentures. There is also a picture of her mother’s scarred skin. For Miyako, ‘things touched by my mother were like part of her skin.’ The intimacy and poignancy of such photographs is continued in other pictures: the clothing and personal objects of Atomic bomb victims, from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and Frida Kahlo’s belongings, her nail varnish, decorated corsets and casts, through which one can sense the presence and strength of the artist. Miyako is responsive to the intrinsic properties and resonances of photography as an auratic medium. In contrast to Calle’s funereal retrospective, for Miyako, objects from the past, through photography, are ‘revived in the present moment.’

In many ways, New Farmer (2024) by Bruce Eesly offers a bright, jaunty and comic interlude to the festival; an AI generated mock documentary, consisting of photographs and texts presented as if from the 1960s, parodying the Green Revolution’s goal of intensified agricultural yields, by showing farmers, fields and smiling kids replete with oversized vegetables. Such absurdity and fakery serves as a fictional counterpoint to the reality of what increasing farming yields has led to, as the artist says: ‘giant fields of monocultures, fertiliser run-off, pesticide pollution and a major loss of genetic plant diversity.’

The revelation of Nicolas Floc’h’s exhibition is that there is a rainbow of colours in water. His epic quasi-scientific project, Rivers Ocean. The Landscape of Mississippi’s Colors (2024), a dazzling array of different blocks of pure colour prints, the result of photographs taken underwater at different depths, presented together with black-and-white photographs of the land, nevertheless remained baffling. While the descriptive detail in some of the captioning texts might help explain what causes the colours – ‘In Minneapolis, the Mississippi gets its colour from the tanins of northern forests… At the surface, a bright luminous orange turns bright red at one to two meters in depth’ – in the end, I was left pondering the gulf between these beautiful and seductive colour fields and the pollution and ecological disaster they presumably are indexing.

At La Mécaniqué Générale, there is more colour, not so much in the photography, which is predominantly black-and-white, but on the walls that animate and resist the potential stasis of ordered clusters of photographs in Urs Stahel’s beautifully curated show, When Images Learn to Speak, drawn from the collection of Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall. Since the collector has been buying up whole series rather than individual photographs, Stahel pursues the conceptual implications of serial groups of images, beginning with Harry Callahan’s street portraits and Walker Evans’ worker portraits. The show is very much about the formal richness, the subtleties and lasting fascination with what are mostly now classic photographs. There are also some nice surprises, including Max Regenberg’s billboards, for example, in both colour and black-and-white, taken over two decades, a simple register of fortuitous collisions and relations between the imagery of billboards and their settings: the crumpled rear end of a car appearing as if trampled by giant feet on the advertising beside it. Is there not a lesson for Arles here? Maybe we do not need the fireworks. Straight(-forward) photography can still be very engaging and lasting.  

Stahel’s curation links well with Lee Friedlander’s small survey show at LUMA. Friedlander was also in Stahel’s show and some of his TV pictures appear in both exhibitions. An outlier to the festival, the Friedlander exhibition nevertheless was a vital and refreshing addition. Selected and curated by filmmaker Joel Coen, the show underscores the enduring richness of his work and brilliant understanding of the possibilities of photographic form. Coen is skilled in picking out the compositional play of elements in well-known and lesser-known Friedlanders. The point made by Friedlander in the 1960s was that montage effects can already be found in the world; it is a question of framing. He is a picture-maker who made a virtue out of the limits of photography. A pity there are so few new contemporary photographers on show at Arles that come close.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024 runs until 29 September 2024.

 

 

 

 


Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

Images:

1-Sophie Calle, Finir en Beauté, 2024. Courtesy Anne Fourès

2-Cristina de Middel, An Obstacle in the Way [Una Piedra en el Camino], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

3-Cristina de Middel, The One That Left [La que se Fue], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

4-Cristina de Middel, The Black Door [La Puerta Negra], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

5-Mary Ellen Mark, Rekha with beads in her mouth, Falkland Road, Mumbai, India, 1978. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

6-Mary Ellen Mark, Vashira and Tashira Hargrove, Suffolk, New York, 1993. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

7-Mary Ellen Mark, The Damm family in their car, Los Angeles, California, 1987. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

8-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled. From the eyes, the ears series, 2002-04. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

9-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997 from the Hiroki series. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

10-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled from the Tōdai Zenkyōtō series, 1968-69. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation.

11-Ishiuchi Miyako. Mother’s #35. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

12-Ishiuchi Miyako. ひろしま / hiroshima #37F donor: Harada A. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

13-Bruce Eesly, Peter Trimmel wins first prize for his UHY fennel at the Kooma Giants Show in Limburg, 1956. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

14-Bruce Eesly, Selected potato varieties are rated in sixteen categories according to the LURCH Desirable Traits Checklist, 1952. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

15-Bruce Eesly, Farm table in Dengen, 1955. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

16-Nicolas Floc’h, White River, Badlands, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

17-Nicolas Floc’h, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

18-Nicolas Floc’h, Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

19-Nicolas Floc’h, Mississippi River, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

20-Moyra Davey, Subway Writers III, 2011. Courtesy the artist

21-Martha Rosler, Photo-Op, photomontage. From the House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, 2004. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne/Munich

22-Judith Joy Ross, Annie Hasz, Easton, Pennsylvania, Protesting the Iraq War, Living With War. From the Portraits series, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

23>24-Courtesy Lee Friedlander and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York.


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