Three Japanese Women Photographers Who Change the History of Photography

Kelly McKormick, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Three Japanese Women Photographers Who Change the History of Photography How does our understanding of the history of Japanese photography and of modern Japan change when we learn about three moments in the twentieth century when women photographers shaped current events with their cameras? Beginning with the writer Hayashi Fumiko, who was sent to China as an embedded writer (jūgun sakka) for the Japanese Ministry of Information’s “Pen Squadron”, I explore the role that women photographers played in supporting and legitimizing Japanese colonialism and armed conflict in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, I introduce Akahori Masuko, one of the photographers who represented the “women of the new workplaces” in the postwar period – those who sought to break down the barriers to women working in the public sphere and recast jobs that had been gendered male as open to all. Through her work photographing prison laborers on an industrial dam project and inmates at a women’s prison, Akahori’s social documentary photographs expanded the boundaries of the photographable in the 1950s. I conclude with the work of Matsumoto Michiko, photographer of the Japanese women’s liberation movement who developed a practice of portraiture to counter the spectacularization of women’s bodies in the mass media. Matsumoto redefined portraiture as an honorary and liberating way to envision community. The history of the Japanese feminist political revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s have until recently been written without considering what photography did to make these movements possible. Making these women’s stories and photographs known allows for a course correction: a history of Japan and photography that fills in absences so that they may not be translated into current-day repetitions. What is more, exploring underutilized archives and source materials, this new history of vernacular Japanese photography, and indeed of worldwide photographic culture, is one that argues not merely for the inclusion of excluded figures, such as the women photographers I introduce. It shows how the writing of history itself must be examined for the ways it has systematically supported exclusions of experience in favor of canonical narratives. Using Japan as its focal point, this project writes a gendered analysis that intervenes in research on the international cultures of photojournalism, mass media, and photography as a gendered practice. Kelly Midori McCormick co-created the website Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography and contributed to the book I\u27m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers From the 1950s to Now

\u3cem\u3eAfter Songs\u3c/em\u3e: An Evening of Poetry and Music

Michael McFee, Price Walden, and Michael Rowlet

Grave Goods, a Portrait, a Biography or Reliquary of a Woman’s Life

Nettie Edwards, Artist, Educator, Independent Researcher, Cheltenham, England. Grave Goods, a Portrait, a Biography or Reliquary of a Woman’s Life “‘These are her things,’ he was saying. ‘These are her things! She touched these things, she chose and bought them one by one, she arranged them lovingly and she thought they were beautiful. Oh my mother, my poor foolish little mother!’ The tears were streaming down his face.” — The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B. Edwards. I would like to propose a brief description, with accompanying slides, of the work I presented in the exhibition NATURAL MAGIC at the Bodleian Library Oxford in 2023. GRAVE GOODS is an anthotype and chlorophyll print series made during lockdown in 2020. Working with items salvaged from my deceased aunt’s belongings, not only as photographic subjects but as materials and equipment with which to make plant-based, camera-less photographic prints. Grave Goods may be viewed as a portrait, a biography, or reliquary of a woman’s life. It proposes an important role for photographic impermanence, particularly as a component of grief work. Nettie Edwards is an artist, educator and independent researcher. Named as a contemporary experimental photography reference in the 2019 Pearson Edexel A-level Art & Design paper, she is recognised as an early innovator in the smartphone photography and arts movement (from 2009 onwards) and for her commitment, since 2014, to working with sustainable photographic processes, most notably Anthotype & Chlorophyl printing. She leads workshops and residences, and gives presentations about both her digital and analogue work, in the UK & internationally. In 2020, her project Graves Goods won the100 Heroines EXPERIMENTAL open call (juror Ellen Carey). Exhibitions include: Natural Magic: Experiments in Photography Bodleian Library, Oxford 2022; Struck By Light Experimental Photo Festival, Barcelona 2020; Fabric of Photography Photo Oxford 2021; Contemporary Anthotypes Rhode Island Centre for Photography, 2022. In 2013, she became the first smartphone photographer to have work shown at Lacock Abbey, in the exhibition Black & White Photography In The 21st Century