A new monograph spotlights Miyako Ishiuchi, photographer of the belongings of Frida Kahlo and Hiroshima victims

A new monograph published today makes the case for Miyako Ishiuchi as one of the most important photographers of the modern era. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, edited by Lena Fritsch and Yasufumi Nakamori, spans five decades of the artist’s career while placing unusual emphasis on Ishiuchi’s own voice. Alongside extensive reproductions of her work, the volume includes extracts from her earlier writings, an in-depth interview conducted by Fritsch and a newly commissioned essay by the photographer herself.

Born in 1947 and raised in Yokosuka, a Japanese port city shaped by the presence of an American naval base, Ishiuchi emerged within a photography world that was overwhelmingly male-dominated. She became one of the few women of her generation to achieve international recognition, developing a practice that challenged conventional approaches to documentary photography.

At the heart of Ishiuchi’s work lies the premise that history reveals itself through surfaces. Rather than documenting events, she photographs the traces they leave behind – scars on skin, worn clothing, crumbling apartments, lipstick tubes, dentures. In her images, objects and body parts become repositories of memory, carrying the imprint of lives that might otherwise go unrecorded.

Her breakthrough came with ‘Yokosuka Story’ (1976-77), a series made upon returning to the city of her childhood. Rather than producing a straightforward documentary account, Ishiuchi photographed streets, buildings and neighbourhoods marked by the proximity of the US naval base. She followed it with ‘Apartment’, a study of ageing interiors and decaying architecture that earned her the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1979.

In the 1990s, Ishiuchi turned her attention to women’s bodies, producing close-up photographs of surgical scars and other physical marks – records of experience inscribed on flesh. This was followed by ‘Mother’s’, made after her mother’s death, in which shoes, dresses, cosmetics and dentures become vehicles for exploring grief.

Two later series extended this logic from the personal to the historical. For ‘Hiroshima’, Ishiuchi photographed the clothing and personal belongings of atomic bomb victims. Her focus was not the disaster itself but its intimate residue.

A similar sensitivity informed a project commissioned by the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. Ishiuchi photographed the Mexican artist’s most personal possessions – the corsets that supported her damaged spine, the dresses that became part of her public image, the medicines that sustained her and the cosmetics used to construct her iconic appearance. Kahlo’s belongings had been sealed away by Diego Rivera following her death in 1954 and remained hidden from public view for half a century; it was fitting that Ishiuchi – an artist preoccupied with what objects carry across time – was the one to photograph them.

Traces is the book that Ishiuchi’s career has always deserved.