Inside the Photography of Ishiuchi Miyako - Research

Inside the Photography of Ishiuchi Miyako

70 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese artist imbues women’s objects from the event with a ghostly presence.

"For the last eight years, Ishiuchi has traveled to Hiroshima to photograph objects affected by the atomic bombing of that city, now preserved by and housed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.Shimomura Mari, a curator at the museum who has assisted many artists intent on utilizing artifacts from the collection for their own creative projects, acknowledges that Ishiuchi approaches the subject unlike anyone else. When I visited the Peace Memorial Museum last year, Shimomura told me that Ishiuchi’s straightforward, intuitive approach surprised her initially. Ishiuchi’s equipment and setup are very basic (she occasionally uses an automatic point-and-shoot camera) and she often speaks to the objects while photographing them. Both casual and intimate, Ishiuchi’s practice involves fostering a kinship with each object that she ultimately decides to depict. Moreover, Ishiuchi tends to isolate fragments of clothes or details in the garments—such as hems, buttons, lace, wrinkled fabric—as her subjects. She presents them in vivid colour and in large scale, thus encouraging viewers to look at what might otherwise escape notice, particularly when displayed in Plexiglas vitrines.

Reflection

There is a ghostly presence within the photographs of Ishiuchi Miyako, the artist that uses both the objects themselves as well as photographic representations of the items to tell the story of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Going back to a piece of  text I read about traces of memory in a book entitled Contemporary Art and Memory, I notice a juxtaposition of ideas, while Miyako takes objects that have clearly been damaged through the bombing and displays them as artefacts of a crime. Miyako also collects photographs of happy memories all taken before the death of her mother. This provides a different tone to the otherwise similar collections, after taking objects that represent a fuller picture of a life and memorialises the existence of her mother, it seems somewhat strange to compare that with the mournfully in there placement of her work on the Hiroshima bombings. Yet all these object have supporting text that contextualise there display. If I were to arrange this work myself, I would present it in a very similar way, however I feel the addition of an audio piece would link the objects further.

                                                                                                                                                          

 Sources

http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/inside-the-photography-of-ishiuchi-miyako/