TAB Event - Miyako Ishiuchi "Hiroshima/Yokosuka"

Miyako Ishiuchi "Hiroshima/Yokosuka"

This event has ended.
At Meguro Museum of Art
Media: Photography, Art Talk

Miyako Ishiuchi was born in Gunma Prefecture in 1947 and raised in Yokosuka, a city that she began taking photographs of in the mid 70s. She captured on film the complex faces of the underbelly of postwar Japan that had seen much economic growth, attracting much critical acclaim for how this social background came through in her portraits of the city of Yokosuka. The scenes of the city captured in Ishiuchi's "Poem: Yokosuka Story," a deft summary of the travails and yearnings of postwar life in this city, were longingly referenced in the reminiscences of a wretched life as described in the autobiography of Yokosuka-born singer Momoe Yamaguchi - perspectives on her own town that Yamaguchi herself only retroactively came to appreciate through Ishiuchi's prescient images.

In 1979, Ishiuchi won the Ihei Kimura Prize for his "Apartment" collection of photographs of mortar apartment buildings in the Tokyo area, sealing her reputation as a photographer. She became known for her sympathy for the weight and importance of individual lives and histories as seen from "bodies." Her work from the same year, "1.9.4.7", featured the hands and feet of women born in that year. Her unwavering attention to the wrinkles, "tree rings" and other individual marks carved into the skin and nails of the hands and feet of her subjects evince a profound sympathy for the singular lives of each of these individuals.

This year, Ishiuchi completed her new "Hiroshima" series, consisting of 40 works that capture relics of clothing and other personal effects left over from the atomic explosion on display at the Hiroshima Peace Museum, articles that recall the lives of Hiroshima residents before the bomb. Some of these works will be exhibited at Paris Photo in November, along with Ishiuchi's solo exhibition at the Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum from June 28th to August 10th, as well as being published in the "Hiroshima" photo collection (April 26th 2008, from Shueisha).

Talks and lectures are also scheduled (Japanese only). See website for details.