I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

The title comes from a line by Rinko Kawauchi, named by one of the photographers inside it rather than by the institution that assembled them. That small fact signals what editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, working with curator Takeuchi Mariko, were trying to build.

In 1976, Ishiuchi Miyako organised an all-women exhibition in Tokyo called "One Hundred Flowers In Bloom". The 1980s brought a second, "Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to the 1980s". This book is the contemporary successor, running 440 pages across 25 portfolios and 518 images. The photographers span nearly eight decades, from Okanoue Toshiko's postwar surrealism to Shiga Lieko's psychological imagery and the quieter domestic work of Nagashima Yurie.

The text apparatus is as consequential as the photographs. Three long essays by photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick and by Takeuchi Mariko provide historical and critical framing. An illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman goes further. But the most significant material may be the critical writings by Japanese curators and historians including Kasahara Michiko and Fuku Noriko, many translated into English here for the first time. That body of writing makes this a reference volume, not a picture book with captions.

The range across the 25 portfolios is wide. Ishiuchi Miyako's intimate photographs of her mother's clothing sit against Narahashi Asako's underwater landscapes and Yanagi Miwa's large-scale constructed tableaux. That breadth is the argument: there is no single tradition these twenty-five photographers belong to, only practices the established canon chose not to carry.

This is not a deep monograph on any one photographer. Readers wanting to spend time with Kawauchi Rinko's full body of work will need to look elsewhere. What the book provides is a critical introduction to twenty-five practices, with the translations to back it up.

The book has been touring since July 2024: Rencontres d'Arles, Fotomuseum Den Haag, FFF Frankfurt, The Photographers' Gallery London, Hikarie Hall Tokyo, and ICP New York into early 2027.