Concept video for Fuji|||||||||||ta and Rewire Festival in Hague. Lighting director: Takashi Watanabe Costume: THE HINOKI Special thanks: Blackmagic Design / Tomoya Takeshita / The Hinoki Production manager: Maki Shoji (SANA)
“Advice is fine, but don’t listen to everything,” says the pioneering and award-winning Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. Miyako argues that the road to success for a photographer is about improving your cultural knowledge and “to do your best, and then you will see the result.” Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) is a Japanese photographer. In 2005, Miyako represented Japan at the 51st Venice Biennale with her work ‘Mother’s’ (2000-2005). She has been the subject of solo retrospectives at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2015) and the Yokohama Museum of Art (2017), among others, and her work is held in the collections of MoMA in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Miyako’s accolades include the Kimura Ihei Memorial Photographic Award (1979), and the 2014 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. Ishiuchi Miyako was interviewed by Mette Holm in her home in Kiryu in March 2020.
“I can’t capture the past, but the things in front of me are an extension of the past.” Meet one of the most prominent figures in contemporary photography, award-winning Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. In this video, Miyako shares the story behind some of her most pivotal and pioneering works. When she began taking photographs, Miyako enjoyed developing the pictures in the darkroom: “The darkroom was like a womb for me.” Inside it, she explains, she was cut off from the rest of the world: “And from there, a new world was born.” She was commissioned to photograph clothing worn by people during the Hiroshima nuclear bombing of 1945 (‘ひろしま / hiroshima’, 2007-2010): “The things in front of us contain the passage of time. They make you think about the meaning of time gone by. That is what I do with my photos,” she explains, adding that she has never subscribed to all the different photographic theories: “I just thought that photos would make history. I wanted to be someone who makes history.” Ishiuchi Miyako was interviewed by Mette Holm in her home in Kiryu, Japan in March 2020.