Disorderly Bodies: Self-portraiture as Emancipation for Japanese Women

by: Federica Cavazzuti , November 10, 2025

Introduction

It is summer 1994. In the increasingly vibrant art scene of Shibuya, Tokyo, a newly renovated gallery in a former apartment presents an immersive installation featuring a diverse array of photographs on display. The visitors find themselves inside a room entirely covered in red fur, containing a TV, a sofa, and nude self-portraits of the photographer—a young woman—hanging on the walls. Through a curtain, they can access a second, narrower room with dark walls and a series of black-and-white pictures of the artist with her other family members, all of whom are naked in front of the camera (Fujikawa 1994: 114). One image depicts the photographer’s mother, father, brother, and herself, posing together in their living room for a frontal portrait; in another picture, the artist and her mother are sitting in the kitchen, with their bare chests showing above the table; in almost all the images in this series, the subjects stare directly into the camera, with a neutral expression on their face. The venue hosting these striking artworks is the brand-new gallery, P-House. The show is Ai no Heya (Room of Love) by emerging photographer Nagashima Yurie, the latest media revelation in the shifting photography scene of 1990s Japan. The name follows the surname-name standard format of the Japanese language; hereafter, I refer to the artist as ‘Nagashima.’

Born in 1973 in Tokyo, in 1993, while only a 20-year-old student at the Musashino Art University, Nagashima had won the PARCO Prize for her participation in the contest/exhibition Urbanart #2 at PARCO Department Store, Shibuya (Enomoto 2000: 76). The award-winning work was the same series of family photographs displayed at P-House the following year, titled Self-portraits. Later, the same body of work would sometimes be referred to as Kazoku (Family)—for example, by Gabriella Lukács (2015: 177). An unprecedented amount of media coverage followed the presentation of the series. This has since been attributed to the work having initiated a wave of attention focusing on young Japanese women photographers. The critics of the time commonly labelled their work with the controversial term onnanoko shashin (girls’ photography). The escalated visibility was made possible thanks to the highly publicised prizes and exhibitions, which were promoted in various popular magazines and other print media (Friis-Hansen 2003: 272). And so, the emerging artists became celebrities whom the media could easily exploit.

Much has been written about Nagashima over the past three decades of her prolific career. In this essay, I focus particularly on the political and feminist concepts that formed the basis of her early self-portraits, as well as on the reactions they generated in the media and among photography critics. A selection of Nagashima’s past writings, interviews, and magazine articles published in Japan at the time of her debut on the art scene will be the starting point of this analysis. All these texts demonstrate how her practice and ideas evolved over the years and were reflected in her artworks. I also investigate the effect these photographs had on other Japanese women artists in more recent years, with a focus upon Sawada Tomoko and Katayama Mari, whom I will discuss in more detail.

Nagashima Yurie in the Context of Photography by Japanese Women

To gain a clearer understanding of the resonance of Nagashima’s self-portraits, it is crucial to contextualise her work within the broader framework of Japanese photography. From a historical perspective, since its introduction in the country almost two centuries ago, photography has been a male-dominated practice, which systematically excluded those who did not belong to the predominant group. The common, longstanding stereotype that defines men by their supposedly rational approach can be found in discourses about photography across the whole life of the medium in Japan, which for a long time was—and to some extent still is—thought to be men’s serious pastime (Ross 2015: 7). Until very recent years, the space reserved for women in the photography realm seemed to be exclusively limited to the role of models for the camera: a camera that, being handled mainly by men, became the tool through which the male gaze is actualised into images. The male gaze is, in Sandra Lee Bartky’s (1982) terms, the male dominant perspective that sexually objectifies women and, according to Pollock (2003), a mastering gaze that dictates the politics of looking.

Portraiture of aesthetically pleasing women, or bijin (beautiful women), derived from the previous woodblock print tradition has since the late 19^th century been one of the most recurring photographic subjects in Japan; this extremely successful genre was also widely exported abroad and contributed to the creation of the icons of Japanese femininity in the collective global imagination (Wakita 2012: 331-332; Fraser 2017: 174-175; Wakita 2019: 7). In general, throughout the history of Japanese photography, images of women were seen as eroticized objects for the male gaze, consumed in different printed media and recurrently used in combination with commercials to increase sales. The advertisements produced by the photography industry’s thriving market across the 20^th century, for instance, often connected the latest camera models with pictures of women operating the products, as proof of the effortlessness of using the newest technology (Ross 2015: 43-48). At the same time, images such as these reinforced the common clichés that led to the conception of cameras and all the machines and technological equipment as generally unsuitable for use by women.

In this context, very few women artists managed to develop a career in photography during the 19^th and 20^th centuries in Japan, unlike the male producers of images who, during that time, were being featured in the most prestigious photography magazines, such as Camera Mainichi and Asahi Camera, or in the first historical photography exhibitions—to mention two examples: the seminal show Shashin 100 nen: Nihonjin ni yoru shashin hyōgen no rekishiten (A Century of Japanese Photography: A historical exhibition of the photographic expression by the Japanese), hosted at Seibu Department Store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, in June 1968; and the exhibition Nihon gendai shashinshi ten: Shūsen kara Shōwa 45 nen made (Exhibition of the history of Japanese contemporary photography: From the end of the war to 1970) at the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo in 1975 (Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai: 1971; Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai: 1977). A decisive shift occurred across the late 1980s and early 1990s: first, in education, there was a significant increase in the number of young women enrolled in universities or in courses specialising in photography; second, in the variety of low-cost cameras and photographic products available (Borggreen 2018: 281-282). The greater accessibility of the photography equipment allowed a diversification of consumers, including young women. This was also the moment when compact cameras, disposable cameras, and purikura (an abbreviation for ‘print club,’ referring to a photobooth) began to gain popularity among adolescents. A trend that developed particularly among young girls was the creation of photo albums, which often featured a large number of self-portraits, to document their everyday lives (Miller 2005: 130).

In addition to this scenario, the 1980s and 1990s were marked by the institutional recognition of the work of some professional women photographers in Japan. The Kimura Ihei Award—established in 1975 by Asahi Shinbun in memory of late photographer Kimura Ihei and arguably the most prestigious photography prize in the country—had been awarded to two women photographers in a rather short space of time: Takeda Hana (b. 1951) in 1989—shared with the other winner, Hoshino Michio (1952-1996)—and Kon Michiko (b. 1955) in 1990 (Marui 2022: 298-299). Considering that, until that moment, the only other woman who had ever received the award was Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) in 1978, more than ten years previously, the sudden attention given to Takeda and Kon can be seen as the signal of an initial shift towards a more official recognition of the importance of the work by women photographers on the art scene.

It is essential to acknowledge that over the past two decades, the number of women photographers in Japan—who, importantly, have presented open challenges to gender norms in their photographs—has significantly increased. At the same time, this multitude of photographers does not necessarily translate into a single ‘feminine’ style; rather, each creator’s stylistic choice and techniques needs to be examined for its unique qualities. On this matter, Borggreen (2003) suggests that any attempt to categorise female artists together based solely on a presumedly different mode of expression that derives from their gender might lead to an inaccurate and incomplete analysis of their work. Still, discourses that superficially grouped young women photographers were commonly shared by the media and the art critics of the time, beginning with reviews and comments on Nagashima’s self-portraits.

Examples of Self-representation against the Onnanoko Shashin Discourses

The context described above is the foundation for the sudden rise of photography and self-portraits produced and enjoyed by women in the 1990s. The decade saw a lot of media, including TV shows and magazines, use the label onnanoko shashin in an attempt to define and categorise the phenomenon, particularly in relation to the work of artists such as Nagashima Yurie, Hiromix (pseudonym of Toshikawa Hiromi, b. 1976), and Ninagawa Mika (b. 1972). The term conceals a slightly derogatory nuance: without providing any stylistic or aesthetic information on their practices, onnanoko shashin draws attention only to the artists’ gender and young age, two aspects that the media narratives could easily exploit. As a result, the self-portraits by Nagashima and the other artists active at the same time suffered from improper and biased analyses that, rather than focusing on the meanings of their photography and on their first-person viewpoints on their generation, preferred to diminish them by framing them as casual, cheerful representations of their daily lives.

Throughout her career, Nagashima offered her own perspective on the topic multiple times: in 2020 she also released ‘Bokura’ no ‘onnanoko shashin’ kara watashitachi no gārī foto e (From ‘your’ ‘girls’ photography’ to our girlie photo) (2020), a thorough investigation in which she looks back at the previous decade and attempts to retrace the history of Japanese female photography of the 1990s-early 2000s, in order to reaffirm the intentions of her colleagues during that period. The limiting views that forced them into the same group resulted in many of these photographers distancing themselves from this superficial categorisation that failed to properly consider their work. The contested term was ‘not supported by those concerned,’ she declares, ‘because they were conscious of the fact that it was a discourse that trivialized them and their work’ (Nagashima 2020, III). Through acts of self-representation, her perspective as a photographer who has been active since that time also offers a position from which to uncover stereotyped views that were shared then and, to some extent, are still present in the discourses on photography by women.

Nagashima’s 2020 publication was also intended as a response to the writings of Iizawa Kōtarō, one of the most influential photography critics on the Japanese art scene of the past decades, who, a few years previously, published the volume ‘Onnanoko shashin’ no jidai (The age of ‘onnanoko shashin’) (2010). This publication, in addition to the numerous essays and articles written by Iizawa since the 1990s, which often began their discussions with Nagashima’s self-portraits, contributed to institutionalising onnanoko shashin as a stylistic category. These pieces of writing motivated Nagashima to propose her own analysis in order to deconstruct the strong gender bias that had been trivialising Japanese women’s photography for more than twenty years.

An example of these trivialising discourses can be found in the August 1995 issue of Studio Voice, a popular magazine centred on youth culture, which dedicated a special issue to onnanoko shashin. Some of the writing exemplifies the sort of comments that Nagashima and other young female professional photographers received from art professionals and the media at the time. In his article, for instance, Iizawa talks about the newest transformations of photography, which, in his opinion, has become a rather banal medium, shared by an enormous number of people, who use it to record moments of their personal and daily lives (Iizawa 1995: 12). Specifically, he refers to Nagashima’s self-portraits as the most vivid examples of how photography replicates private experiences; in addition, he declares, ‘I do not consider Nagashima to be in the same league as Robert Frank, Nan Goldin or Nobuyoshi Araki, and she may not even be a ‘photographer’ yet. Even so, I think that I can sense in this 20-year-old girl the ‘enthusiasm’ to try weaving together, with her clumsy hands, an amalgam of life and photography’ (Iizawa 1995: 13).

From his words, it seems that Iizawa feels the need to clarify that Nagashima’s images were less valuable as other internationally appreciated photographers; the word gikochinai (clumsy, unrefined) is used to refer to the young female photographer’s hands and, by extension, becomes a definition of her photographic technique. In addition, although the issue of Studio Voice was specifically centred on photographs by young women, Iizawa even questions the legitimacy of calling her a professional photographer at all. However, by the time his article was published, Nagashima had already received the Parco Award for her series of family self-portraits, produced a number of new and different projects, and had taken part in several exhibitions, and thus was already recognised as a professional photographer on the Japanese scene, in contradiction to the critic’s view.

‘What I have written about Nagashima,’ Iizawa adds, ‘is the same for other photographers. They no longer believe in any kind of aesthetics or public duty and now expect photography to function only as a way to “(re-)edit life.” This is especially true for what concerns photographs by girls’ (Iizawa 1995: 13). He sees no political or social impetus behind the photographic productions of young women in the 1990s; however, it can be argued that this is a superficial analysis of their work. The critic’s piercing remarks are in line with the kind of narratives that were diminishing the meanings of the young photographers’ works at the time. Discourses such as these were validated by canonical views of art and photography, and reinforced by gender expectations and stereotypes. As Nagashima puts it, ‘the discourse of women photographers from the early to mid-1990s was influenced by people’s fear of the new, curiosity, and desire for control’ (Nagashima 2020: 97).

Another stereotypical narrative that was prevalent in the criticism of the time is the notion that easier-to-operate and lighter cameras were the primary reason women began to become photographers in the 1990s, despite supposedly being unable to master photographic techniques (Nagashima 2020: 2-5; 165-168). While it is not untrue that more cost-effective photography equipment available on the market can be considered among the main causes of the growing number of consumers in Japan, more prejudiced views have used the commodification and the simpler mechanisms of cameras as additional evidence of the inexperience of women producing photographs.

Traces of such discourses can be found in past writings by Iizawa. In 1996, for instance, the critic produced a volume entirely centred on those photographers whom he believed could be considered part of the onnanoko shashin group. It was titled Shutter and Love: Girls are Dancing on in Tokyo and included the works of sixteen photographers. In his essay for the volume, Iizawa comments on contemporary photography and the different ways it breaks from the past, recognising that the field was historically male-dominated, and describing new trends. However, when it comes to the young women’s practice, he writes, ‘Big heavy cameras requiring troublesome handling therefore become a nuisance. A camera thrown in a purse or satchel together with cosmetics, easy to take out whenever one pleases—this is what is needed.’ (Iizawa 1996: 159). The comments by the critic reveal some stereotypical views that tend to associate young women photographers with a certain casual and negligent attitude towards their subjects, and an automatic impulse to take pictures: ‘As soon as they see something they like,’ he says, ‘they click their camera’ (Iizawa 1996: 159). Even years later, Iizawa’s opinions seem very similar to those included in the Shutter and Love essay; in his 2010 publication, he describes the process of transformation of photographic equipment, with it becoming compact, available to everyone, and cheaper, as ‘feminization of the camera’ (Iizawa 2010: 39). This definition once again created a connection between the easier methods of operation of the photographic gear and a transition towards femininity.

The responses provided by Nagashima demonstrate that the familiar discourses on photographs by young women did not offer a proper explanation of the techniques used by each artist. Indeed, Iizawa does not seem to consider the actual practice of the artists he describes. It is Nagashima herself, in her interview featured in the volume, that dismantles this idea by recounting that she used to carry two cameras at the same time, ‘a big manual Nikon and the other, a Minolta, with a 28-mm and 50-mm lens’ (Nagashima and Kaneko 1996: 18). She even adds that she used this equipment for so long that its overall weight—approximately 4 kg—gave her neck problems (Nagashima and Kaneko 1996, 18). Back then, Nagashima presented a completely different image of herself to the critic’s portrayal of the young female photographer as frail and not inclined to carry heavy tools.

In addition, it would be incorrect to attribute the exclusive adoption of digital equipment to the women who started making images in the 1990s, as the use of analogue cameras was more common than usually believed. Nagashima, in her 2020 publication, points out the contradiction in the Shutter and Love volume regarding the matter. She explains, ‘all my photographs were taken with a manual single-lens reflex camera (Nagashima 2020: 155),’ and proceeds to describe the techniques adopted by the other photographers in the publication: ‘The proportions of the photographs by Tsuji Saori, Shiratsuchi Yasuko and Fujioka Aya indicate that they were taken with medium-format or larger cameras. The photographs by Nakashima Kohide, Kaneko Ayako, Nakano Aiko, Takahashi Mariko, Tosaki Miwa and Ninagawa Mika were also probably realised with a single-lens reflex camera, based on the way the self-portraits were taken, the focal length and the blurriness of the lens’ (Nagashima 2020: 155). According to her words, then, it is highly likely that most of the sixteen photographers gathered in the volume did not use compact cameras to take their photographs.

The act of attributing simpler tools to them than those actually used is additional proof of the attempt to diminish the importance of the works by women photographers at the time. These trivialising narratives might have aimed to focus on more superficial matters, thereby reducing the space for discussion of the political elements in these artists’ series. The same happened for Nagashima’s use of self-portraiture, whose multiple layers and meanings were not properly considered by media presentations of her work in the 1990s.

The Role of the Nude Body in Nagashima’s Self-Portraits

Considering this wider context, let us now return to the artworks. Examining the images produced by women photographers of the 20th century reveals that self-portraiture was largely absent. I suggest that it was Nagashima who encouraged a resurgence in the use of self-representations among other photographers active at the time and in the years that followed by placing the genre at the centre of her work.

After the award-winning family nude series, Nagashima produced several other projects in a short period of time, publishing the photobooks Nagashima Yurie Shashinshū (1995) and Empty White Room (1995), which collected the photographs of herself and people close to her taken over the previous years. The first volume in particular comprises only self-portraits of the photographer in her home, in different outfits or without clothes, giving shape to what Nagashima calls ‘room nudes’ (Martin, Ishiuchi, and Nagashima 2014: 13). Besides being a direct reference to the location where these self-portraits are set, the term is a pun between the Japanese word for ‘room,’ heya, and the expression ‘hair’ that is widely used in photography to indicate ‘hair nudes,’ a term used to identify images that violate the Japanese censorship rules regarding representations of pubic hair and genitalia. When her early nude self-portraits were first exhibited, they were commonly perceived as obscene works; in her words, ‘in terms of the pornography-art spectrum, they were closer to pornography’ (Martin, Ishiuchi, and Nagashima 2014: 12). The use of nudes in Nagashima’s practice, however, has specific implications that first require some consideration of the ideas of bodies.

 

Fig. 1. Nagashima Yurie, Self-portrait (Tank Girl Blurry), 1994. © Nagashima Yurie, courtesy the artist.

 

Over the past few decades, bodies have been widely discussed on a global level as cultural and historical constructs in feminist studies. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, highlighted how the patriarchal order assumes the male body as the standard universal model against which all other bodies are compared (1994). In her words, it is ‘the ideal representative without any idea of the violence that this representational positioning does to its others … who are reduced to the role of modifications or variations of the (implicitly white, male, youthful, heterosexual, middle-class) human body’ (Grosz 1994: 188). On bodily matters, we must also take into account Judith Butler’s discussion of the dynamics that define bodies and cannot be experienced independently from a socially articulated ‘ideality’ (Butler 2004: 28). Bodies, then, exist in relation to a set of norms, which implies that non-normative bodies exist in a constant struggle to redefine these norms (Butler 2004). Moreover, the corporeal has a public and social dimension: ‘constituted as a social phenomenon, in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine,’ Butler writes, to express how the body is formed first of all by social life (Butler 2004: 21). In Butler’s view, the linguistic use of categories that define the bodies in domains such as the biological, anatomical and chemical ones, as well as the interpretations and the affirmations of those categories, are socially and historically produced; ultimately, they are constructed through the creation of boundaries that include, exclude, and produce hierarchies among subjects (Butler 1993: 36). These dynamics of power are, therefore, entangled with identity questions—to be seen not as a uniform entity, but as different identities, defined by interlacing positions such as race, class, sexuality, and gender—which can be constituted or erased. (Butler 1993: 79) The representations of the body cannot be neutral: in this scenario, the media activities and the discourses in relation to bodies have a primary role that influences the constitution or erasure of identities.

The patriarchal, male-female binarism implicit in the norms regulating the corporeal features has historically identified the female body as the main variation of the male body, its ‘other,’ and produced norms that regulate how female bodies should look and behave. For Nagashima, these expectations can be identified in the way the female body was often associated with ideas of consumption in Japanese society, an idea that can also be found in many other hyper-capitalist, patriarchal cultures: she argues that, on a global level, most women have some sort of awareness that their bodies are conceived in terms of material value, as items of consumption (Martin, Ishiuchi, and Nagashima 2014: 13). Starting from these considerations, through her nude self-portraits Nagashima aimed to expose the underlying power structure of female nude photographs, realized by and for the male gaze.

At the end of the 1990s, Kasahara Michiko, a prominent feminist curator who has brought gender-related issues in artwork into museum exhibitions in Japan over the past 30 years, raised similar points: she commented on the overwhelming amount of female nudes, reproduced and consumed in large quantities everywhere in Japanese cities, whose repeated poses were intended to please men’s desire (Kasahara 1998: 12). Since the invention of photography, writes Kasahara, almost all nude photographs have been based on the identification of the viewer/photographer with the man and, by contrast, the observed subject with the woman; and the common misconception that the vision of the man equals the vision of humankind as a whole determined the style of nude photography and expectations for women (Kasahara 1998: 12-13). But in the articulated context of photography in the 1990s, women, who until this point were being represented, were looking for their own language to represent themselves (Kasahara 1998: 15). There seems to be a strong connection between the curator’s arguments and Nagashima’s photographic practice, the latter being precisely one of the artists mentioned by Kasahara, and among those with the loudest voices.

For the way it allows to act against the historically set roles in photography, self-portraiture is one of the most radical feminist gestures at an artist’s disposal (Martin and Nagashima 2020: n.p.). Through the act of placing herself behind and in front of the camera simultaneously, Nagashima’s self-portraits aim to subvert the heterosexist order that had up to that point shaped photography and images of women (Nagashima 2020: 46-49). She stated, ‘to me, the most important concept was the act of taking a photograph of myself. The master-servant relationship between photographers and models in Japan in the ‘90s reflected the power relations between men and women generally. As a form of opposition, I wanted to contest photos that might look like art but that simply conceal the dynamic that uses female bodies to obtain profits’ (Martin, Ishiuchi, and Nagashima 2014: 13).^[1]

In pursuit of her aim to subvert and expose power structures, the early self-portraits by Nagashima followed two main directions: first, the scenes of nakedness involving her entire family were intended to generate a sense of awkwardness in the viewer, a reaction that would have made it more difficult to interpret her nudity in these images as sexual; and second, with regard to her room nudes, the intention was to ‘appropriate representations of women in men’s magazines, restructure them into ‘nudes’ and place them in museums and galleries’ (Nagashima and Murakami 2021: 107-108). Thus, these photographs can be seen as a record of the performative acts the artist undertook to embody different characters and roles—not without a certain irony—inspired by depictions of women in the context of popular printed media. They were also the vessel through which the photographer could reappropriate the representations of her own body.

 

Fig. 2. Nagashima Yurie, Self-portrait (School Girl Smoking), 1994. © Nagashima Yurie, courtesy the artist.

 

Nagashima proudly identifies as a feminist—she even curated the exhibition Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses: From the Perspective of Third Wave Feminism at the 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa between October 2021 and March 2022—and she openly discussed how, in the 1990s, the feminist implications of her early works were not so obvious to her. Indeed, it was only at a later stage that she realised all the potentialities for connections with the movement. Despite the clear positions of her early self-portraiture, she had a distorted perception of what the movement was, as a result of the backlash specifically against the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism, with which the 1970s radical feminist movement called Ūman Ribu (Women’s Liberation) has often been identified (Shigematsu 2012). As a part of this backlash, the Japanese media often depicted the movement’s members ‘as unattractive women who were forever angry and voicing their opinions loudly, treating men as enemies’ (Nagashima 2022b: 166).^[2] The artist argues that it is because of these widespread, stereotyped images that many women of her generation were uncomfortable with feminist images and became reticent to identify themselves as such. She believes that, although women may choose not to think of themselves as feminists, this does not alter the fact that a large number of them still support women’s rights and the causes championed by diverse feminist movements around the world (Nagashima 2022a: 9). Following these considerations, then, women who refuse to identify as feminists may in fact only be rejecting the shallow stereotypes of feminism perpetuated by the media for the past fifty years, rather than opposing feminist theories in and of themselves. In Nagashima’s case, although she was not fully aware of the language used to illustrate it at the time, the feminist significance of her early self-portraits is undeniable and has evolved in subsequent work.

Nagashima Yurie’s Legacy in Post-2000s Photography by Japanese Women 

The use of self-portraiture, as initiated by Nagashima in Japan, does not exclusively belong to her work. Indeed, her art practice paved the way for several women photographers, who, in the following years, made extensive use of the genre in their work, with very distinct outcomes. Just a few years after Nagashima’s family portraits, Hiromix offered numerous representations of herself and her personal life, captured through the camera, and Ninagawa Mika also began creating self-portraits among the various photographic genres with which she was working. The three artists, all of the same generation and commonly considered central figures of the aforementioned onnanoko shashin phenomenon in the previous period, were also joint winners of the Kimura Ihei Prize in 2000. While this moment marked an important recognition of their work at the institutional level, however, it could be argued that the decision to award the three photographers together might have been a result of the earlier stereotyped perception of photography by young women, indistinctly grouped together.

At the turn of the millennium, several Japanese women photographers began to focus almost solely on self-portraiture in their practice. Similar to the portraits created by Nagashima, these images affirm the artists’ own identities and reappropriate representations of female bodies from the male gaze. Against a visual culture saturated with representations of tall, slim, young, and healthy female bodies, these photographers present alternative visions that challenge gendered roles, while strongly affirming their knowledge of photographic practice and the legitimacy of their authorship.

Sawada Tomoko (b. 1977) has made unique contributions to the genre over the past few decades. Marked by her keen interest in the relationship between the individual’s inner and outer selves, her photographic series is characterised by her own figure repeated in several variations, embodying multiple women. Not dissimilar to Nagashima’s self-portraits, these images fall somewhere between photography and performance. By using artifice—makeup, clothes, wigs, and digital manipulation—in each, Sawada’s appearance is altered to explore different identities. Many of her photographs address the issues related to the representation of the female body and the gender roles they imply with a critical, ironic, and provocative attitudes, in response to the hyper-consumerism of media images of women as consumer goods.

 

Fig. 3. Sawada Tomoko, ID400, 1998, detail. © Tomoko Sawada, courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

 

Sawada’s debut work, titled ID400 (1998), is a series of 1600 passport photos representing 400 different women, all impersonated by the artist through change of clothes, make-up and hairstyles (Sawada 2004). The creation of the series took weeks of work, during which the artist used the passport photo machine located in the car park of a supermarket near an underground station in Kobe (Sawada 2023: unpaginated). Her statement released on the occasion of the 2000 edition of the New Cosmos of Photography, whose Special Award she won in the same year, declares: ‘An ID picture proves the identity or the existence of a person in the picture. That is, even if someone does not exist in this world, if he or she appears in an ID picture, that person can prove his or her existence,’ and added, ‘Anyone in these ID pictures could be myself’ (Sawada 2000).

After ID400, the artist expanded her work. In the following series, she focused on specific groups of women, combining characteristics of age, profession, and social status, with the intention of exploring how gender roles are imposed upon them. OMIAI♡ (2001), for instance, reproduces the photographic books used by dating agencies to arrange meetings between potential couples for matrimonial purposes. Indeed, in Japanese, omiai refers to the formal appointment between two people with the aim of an arranged marriage—a meeting that occurs between both the individuals involved in the potential marriage and the representatives from the two families (Sawada 2005: unpaginated).

 

 

Fig. 4 & 5. Sawada Tomoko, OMIAI♡, 2001. © Tomoko Sawada, courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

 

The series by Sawada is a collection of full-length studio portraits in which the artist portrays all the characters, each time expressing the presumed personality of each one through their clothing, makeup, and accessories. The result is an account of several women who seem to embody various female stereotypes (elegant, sweet, provocative, traditional, etc.) to cater to the different tastes of the men who will choose them.

Another example is Masquerade (2006), a collection of half-length self-portraits that imitate the style of the posters displaying kyabakura-jo, the cabaret ladies, or hostesses at nightclubs (Sawada 2006; Endo 2021). Additionally, in the series Recruit (2006) Sawada explores the rules governing the attire expected of women in the workplace (Sawada 2015).

Represented again as a series of frontal portraits similar to those included in employment resumes, this work presents 300 different women—all obviously played by Sawada—with the same neutral expression, attire, and neat appearance. It is clear that the aim of both Masquerade and Recruit is to portray women conforming to societal expectations (Endo 2021). Moreover, both series are characterised by the large number of images that compose them—respectively, 50 and 300—and their disposition in geometrical grids, which visually emphasise the accumulation of the same subjects. The multiplication of the photographic portrait in these works produces an effect that, while disorienting, may also suggest that there is no real identity to be found in these photographs: they are all hypothetically possible.

 

 

Fig. 6 & 7. Sawada Tomoko, Masquerade, 2006, detail. Recruit (Navy), 2006. © Tomoko Sawada, courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

 

In addition to these projects, over the past few years several photographic works have celebrated non-conforming depictions of the body. Looking at these images from a feminist and intersectional perspective, it is possible to view them as examples of how non-normative expressions of bodily beauty have been used by marginalized individuals and groups as a common strategy to counter the dominant norms (Havlin and Báez 2018: 15). Therefore, representations in which the concept of the normative body is challenged and redefined through non-conforming aesthetics can be understood as a tool for feminist empowerment.

One of the most striking examples of photographs challenging normative bodies is the work by Katayama Mari (b. 1987), who, similarly to Nagashima and Sawada, produces self-portraits as a way of presenting and defining her own identity. Katayama was born with a rare congenital disease that affected her left hand and lower legs. She has been walking with the use of prostheses or a wheelchair since her childhood. The disabled body is the central element of her photographic work, but not the only one present: in fact, an important part of her art practice is the creation of a space—a room or a specific set—in which she can perform her self-representations by surrounding her body with handmade objects she creates.

 

 

Fig.8 & 9. Katayama Mari, Thus I Exist #002, 2015. Shadow Puppet #008, 2016. © Katayama Mari, courtesy of the artist.

 

Many of Katayama’s images feature the artist posing in front of the camera, surrounded by accumulations of objects such as ornaments or puppets that she sews herself and often uses as her body doubles. The series Thus I Exist (2015), Shadow Puppet (2016), and the more recent Leave-taking (2021) are examples that show how the outline of her physicality becomes confused with the other elements in the image, to the point that the body almost disappears. Other works further emphasise the presence of the objects in the room through the inclusion of a reflective surface. One of them is Mirror (2013). This motif belongs to a long tradition in the history of self-portraits in photography, serving as an artifice to double the artist’s figure and reflect on their appearance.

In recent years, feminist disability studies argued that in the collective imaginary the individual with disability becomes the paradigm of the non-conforming body par excellence: however, far from being a condition of physical inferiority, disability has been identified as a culturally and socially constructed category that differentiates individuals, not dissimilar to other categories such as those of race and gender (Garland-Thomson 2002: 16-17).

 

Fig. 10. Katayama Mari, Mirror, 2016. © Katayama Mari, courtesy the artist.

 

The statement that accompanies Katayama’s Leave-taking series seems to echo these concepts. She writes, ‘I’ve always been acutely aware that I am able to create works because my body is alive and well, and I hope my body will continue to serve me. However, the more I go out into society, the more I feel the headwind of the ‘correctness’ required of that body’ (Katayama undated: n.p). She adds, ‘The world is made to fit ‘correct bodies.’ For me, the objects I was making were substitutes for such a ‘correct body’ (Katayama undated: n.p). For the artist, the contradiction between a society that ostracises her physicality, while still appreciating her works, makes her feel that the real protagonists of these photographs are the objects that surround her, while her body is reduced to nothing more than a mannequin. The scenes she builds, through the accumulations of her hand-sewn puppets and the multitudes of other objects, may, in turn, emphasise her performed gestures or conceal her presence among them.

Creating photographs can be an extremely physical act that leads Katayama to be self-conscious of her own body’s possibilities (Katayama 2019: 19). Her pictures, however, hold a multitude of meanings: reflecting on the socially constructed assumptions about disability, the self-portraits represent a reversal of the standards acting on the body and, while remaining aware of the pressure of these social norms, create their own peculiar aesthetics.

 

Fig. 11. Katayama Mari, Leave-taking #007, 2021. © Katayama Mari, courtesy the artist.

 

Conclusion

Self-portraiture and art based on the body, intimacy, and the concept that the personal is political—whether the artists are conscious of the feminist origins of this view or not—are common in contemporary art (Borzello 2023: 221-222). This is also true of the recent Japanese scene, which over the past few decades has witnessed an increasing presence of artists dealing with the body and its implications, resulting in multifaceted works that combine several techniques and media. In photography, the corporeal element has inevitably become entangled with the works of Japanese women, who, in different ways, have confronted gender-related and bodily issues through their work, particularly since the 1990s.

This article has attempted to provide some examples of how the exploration of the body through self-portraits in Japanese photography has diversified since the mid-1990s. The fact that the photographs presented here are all self-representations does not limit the images to a mere account of the artists’ lives, contrary to the way critics tried to conceptually frame them in the late 20^th century. On the contrary, the recurrent use of the genre reveals a shared need among the photographers to raise their voices, to make a strong and political point, and to reappropriate the representations of their own bodies through performative acts. Following Nagashima, works by Sawada and Katayama echo these concepts: both artists opposed the traditional and historical position of the subject, which was historically reserved for women in the photographic realm, and simultaneously affirmed the legitimacy of their practice.

In conclusion, several considerations can be made regarding potential future developments for the genre in Japan. Feminist art historian Wakakuwa Midori, in her essay in Exploring the Unknown Self: Self-portraits of Contemporary Women, which accompanied the 1991 exhibition by the same title at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (then called Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography), suggested that it is difficult to predict in which direction self-portraiture—and particularly feminist self-representation—will develop (Wakakuwa 1991: 17). If that were true then, it is arguably still more valid now: the genre is still very much used by contemporary artists, because it is a privileged means to explore different aspects of the person, including—but not limited to—non-normative bodies, the spectrum of gender identities, and sexualities located outside the heterosexual model.

In this wider scenario, reflections on photography should take into consideration the gendered stereotypes that have historically characterised the medium and the complicated labour involved in trying to upturn these conceptions, which has been the starting point of the work of many women making photographs in the past few decades. Looking at their image production through comparisons and distinctions, the main characteristic that unifies all the photographers explored in this article can be found in how they individually declared their opposing stances to the dominant order. With a variety of different outcomes, their practices are feminist acts that aim to achieve self-determination through the photographic image. From this viewpoint, the act of looking at themselves through their self-produced images is a way for photographers to tear away the constraints resulting from the external gaze and create new, inclusive representations that can effectively encourage a radical change in the politics regulating the corporeal.

Notes:

^[1] No information is available on the translation.

^[2] Translated by Polly Barton.