To coincide with the Edinburgh Art Festival, Stills is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Ishiuchi Miyako – an influential post-war Japanese photographer. It will be the largest exhibition of Miyako’s work in the UK to date and the first time her work has been exhibited in Scotland. The show which runs from 28 July to 8 October 2022 will consist of a selection of work from some of her most celebrated series including, Mother’s, the series with which she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2005; work documenting the belongings of victims of the atomic bomb which are kept at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum; and photographs from the series Frida, made at The Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City where Miyako photographed Kahlo’s garments such as corsets, cosmetics and shoes.
For Ishiuchi, the physical process of creating prints, which she taught herself by experimenting in a dark room she set up at home, is of critical significance. Her coarse-grained, monochrome style of her early work has been compared to the are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out of focus) style popularised by Daidō Moriyama. This distinctive aesthetic was praised by her mentor Tōmatsu Shōmei, and has been celebrated in numerous exhibition in her home country, and internationally, at institutions including Tate Modern, ICP and MoMA.
More recently, Ishiuchi’s work has continued to record material traces of the passage of time, turning her lens away from locations towards the bodies and personal belongings of people. Her series Mother’s (2002), in which she documented her mother’s possessions as a means of coming to terms with her death, was selected to represent Japan at the 2005 Venice Biennale. This led the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to invite her to capture everyday objects which had belonged to victims of the atomic bomb. The Museo Frida Kahlo commissioned Ishiuchi to photograph Kahlo’s possessions, held in the museum archive (Frida, 2013).
