Few photographers have explored memory, loss and the passage of time with the depth and sensitivity of Japanese artist Ishiuchi Miyako. Over a career spanning almost five decades, Ishiuchi has created a profoundly personal body of work that examines the traces left behind by people, places and history. Our new book Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, offers a comprehensive survey of the artist's remarkable practice, bringing together iconic works alongside previously unpublished and rarely exhibited photographs.
Born in 1947 in Kiryū, Japan, Ishiuchi belongs to the first post-war generation. Her early experiences growing up in Yokosuka – a city shaped by the presence of a major United States naval base – would become a defining influence on her artistic vision.
Through subjects as diverse as old apartment blocks, human scars, kimono fabrics, personal belongings of the deceased, and even her own water-damaged prints, Ishiuchi manifests the invisible, capturing time, atmosphere, and memory in photographic form. Her work is at once deeply personal and evocative of the wider world hinted at by the traces recorded within the frame. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces invites readers to engage with this extraordinary artistic journey and discover how photography can preserve not only appearances, but also the invisible traces of human life.
ISHWEB5 Ishiuchi Miyako. Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya, Clubs & Courts, 1980s
'Things Left Behind: Three Readings' by Lena Fritsch
Old teeth in jars, used lipsticks, torn dresses, colourful relics of Frida Kahlo’s life, mouldy photographs – Ishiuchi Miyako’s photography has mirrored her deep interest in objects and their transitory nature for almost fifty years.
When commissioned by Tokyo Dental College in 1980 to photograph its old building in the Suidōbashi area before the school moved to a new home, Ishiuchi focused her lens not only on the soon-to-be-demolished building, its cracked walls and busy students in laboratories but also on preserved teeth, dentures, curious medical instruments and pin-up posters that all looked like they had been in the college for decades. Over the course of a year, she created a unique record: grainy, dark gelatin silver prints, compiled in the 1981 photobook Suidōbashi, speak as much of the different items that lived in the building as of the history of the school and contemporary student life.
It was not until her series Mother’s (2000–05), however, that Ishiuchi began to truly focus on things left behind. The valedictory project first began as close-up images of the parent’s elderly body and her burn scars, taken on her birthday, 25 March, in 2000. These were later juxtaposed with calm portraits of personal objects that remained with the artist after her mother died just nine months later, in December 2000, such as lipsticks, dentures, hairbrushes and underwear. Mother’s, which represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2005, was also the first major series in which Ishiuchi used colour photography and had her works printed externally – ‘a red lipstick is more convincing in colour,’ the artist has said to explain this shift in her work. The project was a milestone in her oeuvre that she has returned to repeatedly in exhibitions and books such as Miyako C Chihiro: The Story of Two Women in 2019, which juxtaposes her mother’s belongings and life with those of artist Iwasaki Chihiro (1918–1974).
ISHWEB3 © Ishiuchi Miyako. Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya, Moving Away, 2015-18
'For Things That Remain Forever': Ishiuchi Miyako on photographing Hiroshima
ひろしま / hiroshima (2008)
During the ‘Mother’s’ exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, I was asked if I would photograph Hiroshima. ‘What, me?’ That was how it all started. At that time I felt that my Mother’s series, consisting of images of personal items left by my late mother, had established itself as a distinct body of work and had lost its private connotations. Perhaps it was the nature of those photographs that led to me being invited to Hiroshima, a place I had never even visited before. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum contains a collection of approximately 19,000 items – both personal effects of the victims and other objects that survived the bombing – which are on display in the permanent exhibition gallery or carefully preserved in basement storage facilities. For my photographs, I selected items that had been in direct contact with the victims’ bodies.
I gently placed a dress on top of the artificial sun (light box) that I had brought from Tokyo to allow the light to shine through it. I thought about the way that the cloth had been woven, cut and sewn together, the appearance of the garment when it was worn on that fateful morning. The objects that remained in the city after being subjected to a military and scientific experiment do not speak, they merely exist, but despite the horror of the details, I found myself overwhelmed by the bright colours and textures of these high-quality clothes. Countless threads of time drift in the light, intersect and create fountains of memory. I take these small items out into the natural light and allow them to return to something approaching their original, forgotten form. They make me realize that the length of time that has passed since these items were converted into a historical testimony is approximately the same as that which I have lived.
Left: © Ishiuchi Miyako. Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya Frida. Right: 2012ISHIUCHIWEB3 Ishiuchi Miyako. Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya, ひろしま Hiroshima, 2007
'Eternally Frida Kahlo': Ishiuchi Miyako on photographing the belongings of Frida Kahlo (2013)
I never imagined I would fly to Mexico to photograph Frida Kahlo’s belongings. I only had a vague image of her as I had never been especially interested in her. But the moment I encountered her art and possessions, I realized I actually knew absolutely nothing about her.
The human body is vulnerable to the ravages of passing time. Our bodies are transformed by the hour, by the day, refusing to stay the same over the course of even a single day. Only clothes, accessories and cosmetics can protect us. Frida Kahlo prized them all, and imbuing them with her love, adorned herself in her personal aesthetic, using her attire to express her will for life. The objects that touched her flesh remain alive; together, the things she left behind appear before me, conveying her existence.
Frida, who had no choice but to coexist with her fragile flesh and organs, expressed her life and confronted her looming death by depicting her destiny with the clothes she used to dress her body.
In the courtyard of Frida’s Blue House, I bring a Tehuana dress – the traditional attire of Oaxaca, Frida’s mother’s birthplace – into the light of the sun and place it on tracing paper. The vibrant, timeless colors woven into a garment reveal the history of Mexico, and in its classic contours I experience an epiphany: in this country, this garment has the same significance the kimono has in Japan. As I photograph it, I am also capturing my revelation.
My heart aches at the number of Frida’s corsets and casts, far too rigid for clothing. One by one, I photograph them in the natural light of the sun. As the breeze ripples through them and dappled sunlight pours over them, the corsets I had found so binding begin to breathe, yielding to liberation. I sense Frida, suddenly free of pain, slipping up into the sky, and press the shutter of my camera.
I had many revelations during the three weeks I spent in Mexico with Frida’s paintings and possessions. Frida Kahlo may have passed away fifty-nine years ago, but the evidence of her life remains imbued with her breath. To me, it seemed as though her profound gaze had vaulted past her finite body and time on earth, to point a way towards eternal love. Inside the Blue House, where Frida entered and departed this world, I captured the things she left behind as I found them, to escort Frida into photographs, another kind of eternity.
