“When I first encountered the scar, I reflected on photography. . . . While a person hopes to remain unblemished through life, all must sustain and live with wounds, visible and invisible . . . an imprint of the past, welded onto a part of the body.”
Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) began her photographic practice by turning her camera on the streets and buildings of her hometown, Yokosuka—a city reshaped in the postwar years into one of the largest American naval bases in the Pacific. Over the course of more than a decade, she recorded this foreign presence, tracing the lingering material and psychological residues of the US Occupation long after the war’s end. These images fuse personal experience with political consciousness, imbuing the landscape with an intensely subjective charge.
As a student in Tokyo in the late 1960s, Ishiuchi was immersed in a radical political environment shaped by debates around identity and self-expression. These discourses prompted her to confront her conflicted relationship with Yokosuka, and in 1976 she returned to the city—a place she has described as marked by fear, grief, resentment, and disorientation. Although her physical presence appears only once in these early works, in the form of a shadow, Ishiuchi has emphasized their deeply autobiographical nature, describing the Yokosuka photo books as “totally personal […] my very own skin, born in the darkroom.”
The act of printmaking itself holds particular importance for Ishiuchi. Self-taught, she honed her skills through experimentation in a darkroom she constructed at home. The resulting coarse-grained, high-contrast monochrome photographs have often been compared to the are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) aesthetic associated with postwar Japanese photography. This distinctive style attracted early critical acclaim and has since been widely exhibited in Japan and internationally.
In later work, Ishiuchi shifted her focus from sites to bodies and personal effects, continuing her investigation into the physical traces left by time. In Mother’s (2002), she photographed her late mother’s belongings as a means of processing loss; the series was selected to represent Japan at the 2005 Venice Biennale. This project led to further commissions, including an invitation to photograph everyday objects belonging to victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and a series documenting Frida Kahlo’s personal possessions held in museum archives (Frida, 2013).
Ishiuchi has been the subject of major solo retrospectives in Japan and abroad, including exhibitions at prominent museums in Yokohama and Los Angeles. Her numerous honors include some of the most prestigious awards in photography, recognizing a career defined by its emotional intensity, material sensitivity, and sustained engagement with memory and history.