Miyako Ishiuchi (石内 都, Ishiuchi Miyako) is a Japanese photographer, born March 27, 1947, in Nitta District, Gunma, Japan. Ishiuchi grew up in Kiryu and Yokosuka, home to the largest naval base in the East. There, she remained until she was 19. “The scars of adolescence that I sustained there had a big effect on me, and you could say that Yokosuka was the starting point for my photography,” the artist tells Ocula Magazine in 2021.
Ishiuchi began photographing with one of the most renowned generations in Japanese photography, which included such photographers as Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu. These photographers were dealing with postwar trauma while also exploring new directions in photography for the new, postwar era.
She began to take close-ups of the bodies of the very old in the early 1990s and more recently, her photographs have addressed themes of skin, clothing, and time. In Hiroshima (2008), she photographed the clothes of victims from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
