Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now — What to See at The Photographers' Gallery Before It Closes

She is pregnant, hair cropped short, cigarette in her mouth, middle finger raised at the camera. Nagashima Yurie titled the photograph Full-figured, yet not full-term. She took it in 2001. It is still, twenty-five years later, not what most people expect a photograph of a pregnant woman to look like.

That image sits inside Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, which spans four floors of The Photographers' Gallery until 27 September. Twenty-seven artists, more than 200 photographs, plus videos, installations and rare photobooks. If you have been meaning to go, you have a month.

The history most of us were taught

Ask anyone who knows a little about Japanese photography to name a few figures and you will hear the same answers: Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, the Provoke movement, grainy black and white images of postwar Tokyo. Those photographers are genuinely important. They are also almost entirely men, and the story that gets repeated about Japanese photography has been shaped around them.

This exhibition puts 27 women into that story, some internationally known, many overlooked for decades. It is curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare, organised by Aperture in collaboration with Rencontres d'Arles, and connected to the 2024 photobook I'm So Happy You Are Here. Taous Dahmani added curatorial work for the London edition.

What makes it worth the trip is that it does not present these women as a footnote or a side gallery. It rebuilds the timeline.

1956: the women nobody photographed with dignity

Tokiwa Toyoko grew up near the US military base in Yokohama. In 1956 she held her first solo exhibition, Hataraku josei (Working Women), at the Konishiroku Gallery in Tokyo.

She is best known for photographing women working in postwar nightlife districts, and for doing it without the stigma that ran through almost every other depiction of those women at the time. She photographed them with agency. She was one of very few people doing that. The following year she was included in Jūnin no me (Eyes of Ten), a landmark group exhibition.

TOKIWA Toyoko, Waiting Room of Byobugaura Prefectural Hospital, 1956. Courtesy Museum of Yokohama Urban History and Aperture

Eleven years later, Watanabe Hitomi enrolled at the Tokyo College of Photography and walked into Shinjuku, then the centre of Tokyo's counterculture and anti-war organising. Between 1968 and 1969 she documented the Zenkyōtō student movement from inside the occupation of the University of Tokyo. It was the longest student uprising of the era, and she was one of the only women photographers working on the front lines of it. Her pictures capture both the confrontations and the ordinary hours in between.

WATANABE Hitomi, Untitled, 1968–69; from the series Tōdai Zenkyōtō. Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo; Galerie Écho 119, Paris; and Aperture

1986: the law that changed who got to hold a camera

Japan's Equal Employment Opportunity Law took effect in 1986, prohibiting gender discrimination at work. The effect on photography arrived within a decade. By 1991, the number of women enrolled on university photography courses in Japan had begun to equal men.

By the mid-1990s a generation of young women were photographing their own lives, bedrooms, friends and relationships, and selling in serious numbers. HIROMIX was the most visible of them. Her 1996 photobook I'm Hiromix: Girls Blue became a cultural event and helped push a diaristic, snapshot style into the mainstream.

Critics gave the work a name: "Girlie Photo". It was not meant kindly. The label framed the pictures as cute, amateur, girlish, a phase rather than a practice. Looking at the work now, in a gallery, the dismissal says more about the critics than the photographs. What HIROMIX and her peers actually did was convince a generation of young women that their own lives were a legitimate subject.

HIROMIX, Hiromix: Girls Blue, Tokyo: Rockin' on, 1996. Courtesy the artist

Ishiuchi Miyako waited until 2006

Ishiuchi Miyako built her reputation on Yokosuka, her hometown and a major US military base, photographing what the occupation left behind in the buildings and in the people. Her series Mother's, made from her late mother's clothes, underwear and lipstick, represented Japan at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Her solo exhibition at Tokyo's TOP Museum opened in 2006. It was the first solo show there by a Japanese woman photographer. In Tokyo. In 2006. She was, by that point, one of the most significant photographers working in the country.

That single fact is probably the clearest argument for why this exhibition exists.

ISHIUCHI Miyako, Mother's #39, 2002. Courtesy Third Gallery Aya, Osaka, and Aperture

What to look for when you go

• Ishikawa Mao — her Akabanaa (Red Flower) series, made in Okinawa between 1975 and 1977, photographing the bars around the US bases while working in them herself.

• Katayama Mari — self-portraits that put her own body, prosthetics and hand-sewn objects at the centre of the frame.

• Kawauchi Rinko — quiet, luminous, close-up work. Look for the untitled 2004 print from her series the eyes, the ears.

• Narahashi Asako — photographs taken from in the water, half-submerged, with Mount Fuji sitting somewhere in the distance behind the swell.

• Okabe Momo — work on queer kinship, care and memory. The gallery has published an interview with her alongside the show.

Also worth knowing: Ninagawa Mika: Captive Blooms is showing outdoors in Soho Photography Quarter until June 2027, and it is free. Large-scale, saturated, hard to miss.

Getting in without paying £14

Admission is free every Friday after 5pm. The gallery is open until 20:00 on Thursdays and Fridays, and last admission is 30 minutes before closing, so arrive between 5pm and 7:30pm and the whole show costs nothing. Members go free at any time.

Three things are still to come before it closes:

• Curator Tour — 6:30pm, Thursday 17 September, included with general admission

• Beyond Labels: Japanese Women Photographers — a one-day event from 11:00am on Friday 18 September, hearing from exhibiting photographers about the work from the 1990s onward

• Japanese photography reconsidered: Women in focus — an online course running 16 September to 21 October, which outlasts the exhibition itself

Have you seen it yet, or is it on your list? Tell us below 👇

Find It

📍 The Photographers' Gallery, 16–18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW (nearest station: Oxford Circus)

🕒 Mon–Wed 10:30–18:00 · Thu–Fri 10:30–20:00 · Sat 10:30–18:00 · Sun & bank holidays 11:00–18:00

🎟 In person £14 (concs £11, Art Fund £8) · Online £12 (concs £9.50, Art Fund £7). Both include an optional £2 donation. Free Fridays after 5pm. Members free.

📅 Until 27 September 2026

📲 @thephotographersgallery

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