Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows

When Ishiuchi and her family moved to Yokosuka in 1953, she was shocked by the prevalence of American military culture there, and quickly began to fear the base, its occupying soldiers, and specific neighborhoods.

For years she harbored these anxieties. After moving away from Yokosuka in 1966, she described it as “a place that I thought I’d never go back to, a city I wouldn’t want to walk in twice.”

In 1980, feeling that her work in Yokosuka was unfinished, Ishiuchi returned to photograph places not represented in her book Yokosuka Story. For this new project, titled Yokosuka Again, she focused on Honchō—the central neighborhood where American military presence felt especially concentrated, with the U.S. naval base and EM (Enlisted Men’s) Club located there.

She targeted the places that terrified her most, including Dobuita Dōri (Gutter Alley), a street populated with bars where American soldiers and prostitutes fraternized. Forbidden to enter it as a child, this street represented the epicenter of Ishiuchi’s anxiety—though she had tried to photograph there in the past, she always ran away before she gained the courage to make a single picture.

In 1977, Ishiuchi began to seek out derelict apartments in Tokyo and other cities. With the permission of residents, she photographed rooms and interiors in the buildings, occasionally portraying the occupants. Her images inside these cramped quarters reveal the grim conditions of each building—peeling paint, dimly lit hallways, and stained walls “steeped in the odor of people who move about”—and suggest many stories housed within these dwellings.

She hoped the disparate rooms and buildings in Apartment, when presented together, would appear as though they were made at the same location. This desire to create a fictitious residential complex met with criticism from traditional documentary photographers, but Ishiuchi nevertheless earned the prestigious 4th Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award in 1979 for her book Apartment.

Ishiuchi omitted facial portraits from the series to enhance the anonymity of the women, focusing instead on extremities that are exposed to the world but often overlooked. In intimate, close-up views, she draws attention to calluses, hangnails, cracked skin, wrinkles, and other visible imperfections.

Ishiuchi began the series Scars in 1991, after she noticed old wounds on some of the men she portrayed for a project called Chromosome XY. Since then, she has continued to photograph visible scarring on the skin of friends, family members, and acquaintances.

For this project, Ishiuchi never identifies her sitters by name, but instead refers to the cause of each scar—such as “accident” or “illness”—when titling the photographs.

To photograph each model who appears in her series Scars, Ishiuchi often uses both color and black-and-white film. Her earliest experiments with color imagery for Scars informed her next series, Body and Air, which presents the bodies of sitters in fragments. 

To generate this series, Ishiuchi utilized a Polaroid SX-70 camera that she purchased in the 1990s. Though she prefers to process and print her film in her own darkroom, she became fascinated with the idea that Polaroid film cameras function like portable darkrooms, able to develop and deliver pictures without physical labor on her part.

Following the death of her father in 1995, Ishiuchi began to strengthen her relationship with her mother, ultimately utilizing photography to forge a deeper bond. Though reluctant to be photographed, Ishiuchi’s mother eventually modeled and allowed her daughter to take pictures of her face and skin, including parts of the body disfigured by a severe scald sustained in 1955.

Old shoes, dentures, used lipstick cases, tattered gloves, and other accessories owned by her mother also feature as subjects. Combining these images with the pictures of her mother made before she died, Ishiuchi generated a somber, gentle portrait with this series.

Ishiuchi, who sometimes speaks to the objects that appear in her pictures, initially used a light box to illuminate fabrics while photographing them. This method allowed her to conjure the ghostlike auras of the victims—which Ishiuchi attempts to reinforce by “floating” the photographs on walls when she installs them—and allude to the “artificial sun” of the bomb.

But the effects of irradiation—visible in the holes, stains, and frayed edges—are offset by the fashionable textiles, vibrant colors, and intricate, hand-stitched details.