In Japan, where photography is traditionally a male-dominated field, Ishiuchi Miyako, 77, She is one of the few women to have accumulated international successes and awards over forty-five years, paving the way for many younger sisters. From the American occupation to the remains of Hiroshima, via the personal effects of her late mother or Frida Kahlo, she explores the passage of time and history. Exhibited this summer at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, she received the Women in Motion award from the Kering group.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…If I hadn’t discovered the euphoria that comes with the darkroom and the manual development of photographs. This is something absolutely amazing. An erotic, almost sexual pleasure. The smell of the chemical, the almost total darkness and the red lamp… Sometimes we talk about bad tripBut for me, a darkroom session is an opportunity to have a good tripA journey into the unknown. Immense freedom. A gigantic field of possibilities.
Has this revelation reoriented your life?
Yes. I had never thought about photography before. It didn’t interest me. I started out going to art school thinking I would go into design, which was a mistake. Then I went into knitting, which turned out to be boring. I was looking in vain for a means of expression. And now a friend left some photo printing and developing equipment at my house for safekeeping. I wanted to give it a try. It was THE encounter with photography. I was around 26, which is very late to dive into a discipline. I was self-taught, but I had never felt such a sense of freedom.
And what did you urgently want to photograph?
Yokosuka, the town where I lived from the age of 6 to 19, south of Tokyo, and which I always hated. It housed an American base that severely affected the city’s atmosphere. It poisoned it, made it sulphurous and completely unbreathable. My parents, my younger brother and I lived in a tiny apartment in a poor and little-frequented area. There were robberies, murders, humiliations. Believe me, I quickly learned the vileness and complexities of being human! But what never ceased to surprise me was that within the city there were borders. And streets where girls were forbidden to enter.
For what? What were they risking?
Being raped, of course! What else? I was little, I didn’t know what it meant, but I felt danger. Sexual crimes were an everyday occurrence in this occupied city. We knew well that the Americans were only after one thing: to satisfy their virile desires. It was palpable on every corner. Before the war, Yokosuka had been a garrison town and housed Japanese naval bases. Back then, there was already this culture of brothels, prostitution districts and debauchery. The post-war period only reinforced this sexual tension. The people in the city were used to it, but I, who was born in the countryside and arrived there at the age of 6, felt a real shock and spontaneously disgusted. On my way to school, I walked through the red light districtthe brothel area, and I felt a great discomfort. This city shaped my psychological landscape. It was she who, very early on, made me realize that I was a woman.
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