If you’ve spent any time around the history of Japanese photography, you’ll know it can sometimes feel like a procession of male names: Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Shomei Tomatsu. All undeniably significant, all exhaustively documented. What tends to get lost in that telling is how many women were working alongside them, ahead of them, or in entirely different directions altogether. This summer’s exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London is a serious, long-overdue attempt to correct that imbalance.
Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now opens 24 June and runs until 27 September, taking over the entire Ramillies Street gallery with over 200 works — photographs, videos, installations and rare photobooks — by 27 artists spanning seven decades. It arrives in London following earlier presentations organised by Aperture in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles, and is timed to accompany Aperture’s 2024 publication of the same name. The curatorial team of Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare has assembled a mix of internationally recognised names and others whose work has received far less attention than it merits.
The exhibition begins in the post-war period, when Japan was undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformation. Women photographers were there documenting all of it: changing social roles, student protests, the collision of tradition and modernity. As employment equality legislation passed in the late 1980s, more women entered professional photography, and their output shifted to reflect new freedoms and new preoccupations — intimate portraits of family life, motherhood, and female experience rendered on their own terms rather than through someone else’s gaze.
The range of approaches on show is considerable. Kawauchi Rinko’s quiet, luminous studies of everyday moments sit alongside the confrontational self-portraiture of Nagashima Yurie; the documentary rigour of Ishikawa Mao’s Okinawa work from the 1970s occupies a different register entirely from the pop-inflected, high-colour images of Ninagawa Mika, whose large-scale flower and goldfish photographs are simultaneously showing outside, for free, in the Soho Photography Quarter right next to the gallery.
What the exhibition makes clear, cumulatively, is that Japanese women photographers were never absent from the story — they were simply not being told as part of it. Curated with evident care and operating at a genuinely ambitious scale, this is the kind of show that changes how you think about a whole chapter of photographic history.
Tickets are £12 (concessions available); admission is free on Fridays after 5pm.
Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now is at The Photographers’ Gallery, 16–18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW, 24 June – 27 September 2026.
