Aya Fujioka

Aya Fujioka was born in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, and graduated from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art in 1994^*1. She has recalled that she did not enroll with a clearly defined ambition to become a photographer; she began taking pictures because she found herself in a photography program^*2. Her life in Taiwan and travels through Europe and Brazil began before she had a plan for making a body of work. Photographs accumulated during those journeys were later selected in Japan and published in 2004 as Comment te dire adieu^*7. In 2005, she joined a roughly 300-kilometer peace march across Belgium calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, recording the ten-day experience in photographs and words^*23. For her next book, I Don’t Sleep, she traveled between Tokyo and Kure, photographing her family home, relatives, and her mother’s body and working hands^*5. In 2007, she moved to New York through the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs’ overseas study program for emerging artists, photographing both the city and domestic interiors for about five years^*11. After returning to Japan in 2012, she began living in Hiroshima in 2013 and developed Here Goes River while walking along the city’s waterways. The Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum describes how Fujioka photographed a city where daily life overlaps with past events, treating rivers whose direction changes with the tides as a figure for memory^*8. She now works between Kyoto and Hiroshima^*1. Across travel, return, and relocation, she repeatedly revisits photographs after time has passed, using them to understand experiences that were not apparent when the pictures were made.

Snapshot Photography — Preserving What Escapes Explanation

Street snapshots are the starting point of Fujioka’s method. She has said that as a student she repeatedly studied Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photobooks, admired his ability to seize an instant, and has continued to photograph in the street ever since^*4. Her present approach does not allow the decision made at exposure to determine the photograph’s final meaning. In Hiroshima, she made an enormous number of pictures because beginning with a theory or intention made it harder to photograph; she later found that the images showed her things she had looked at but failed to notice^*2. When reviewing old negatives, she also discovered that she had repeatedly photographed children and flowers, prompting her to consider her own unconscious choices and the reasons she takes photographs^*13. Fujioka’s snapshots preserve people and objects that slipped outside her conscious understanding. Later selection brings those overlooked elements to the center of the work.

I Don’t Sleep — Her Mother’s Hands and the Unknown Within the Familiar

I Don’t Sleep was made from photographs of Fujioka’s family and hometown, taken while she lived in Tokyo and returned regularly to Kure. SIGMA SEIN notes that the series was photographed during visits between 2000 and 2006, and that her mother appears through her back and oblique profile, working hands, and gestures more often than through a frontal portrait^*5. Fujioka has said that exhibiting the work at the Nikon Salon allowed her to see the flow of the photographs more objectively, while the photobook required repeated decisions about what to include and omit^*3. In its large format, sequences of hands, hair, clothing, flowers, domestic objects, and fragments of the body hold together intimacy with family and the sudden realization that those closest to her remain unknowable. The book leaves intimacy, aging, and estrangement from her hometown unresolved instead of explaining identities and relationships like a family album. The English-language annual report Photographic Expression in Japan, published in the year of the book’s release, likewise identified the raw and strange qualities of family bodies and behavior as a defining feature, indicating an early reception that exceeded the category of intimate record^*18.

Walking in Belgium — Ten Days Inside a Peace March

The 2005 series Walking in Belgium records, in photographs and words, a peace march calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons that Fujioka joined almost by chance. Over ten days and roughly 300 kilometers, she later recalled becoming so absorbed in the march and its encounters that her awareness of taking photographs began to recede^*23. Fugensha presents the experience as an event that occurred about a decade before Here Goes River, placing both works within a continuing engagement with peace and war. Fujioka entered the movement without first organizing a settled position and without fully understanding what she herself was doing. The photographs and words revisit, twenty years later, what it meant to become caught up in the event rather than state a conclusion from outside it. A direct line of influence on Here Goes River cannot be established, but the series anticipates her later tendency to approach historical subjects through events on the ground and her own responses, without reducing them to symbols.

Here Goes River — Why Photograph Everyday Hiroshima?

In the Hiroshima of Here Goes River, the history of the atomic bombing already existed as a powerful set of received images. Fujioka has said that after beginning life in the city, she came to understand how difficult it was to register history through the dense layers of everyday experience. Her view of contemporary Hiroshima also included the many ceremonies and expressions organized around “peace”^*6. Early in the project, the more she considered how “Hiroshima” ought to be photographed, the less able she was to take pictures, burdened by the responsibility of producing an image that would stand for history^*3. She instead photographed people playing by the river, young people posing, passing bodies, seasonal light, and incidents in the street. Without deciding in advance which symbols would explain Hiroshima, she followed what caught her attention in daily life. The Atomic Bomb Dome and forms that evoked past events then appeared in parts of the frame she had not treated as central while photographing. History emerged by changing the meaning of present-day images when she returned to them later.

Hiroshima mon amour — “Seeing, Yet Not Seeing”

While developing Here Goes River, Fujioka showed editor Nozomi Himeno and designer Hisaki Matsumoto Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, scripted by Marguerite Duras, and told them that it suggested something she wanted to do in a photobook. Relating herself to the opening exchange—“I saw it” / “You saw nothing”—she described thinking about a self who was “seeing, yet not seeing”: she lived in Hiroshima and thought she knew the city, but could not present an image and declare, “This is Hiroshima”^*3. In a 2025 interview, she again said that photography becomes interesting outside logic and intention, and that images taught her about things she had looked at without noticing^*2. A photograph does not merely confirm prior knowledge; it can reveal, after the fact, that the photographer’s understanding at the time was incomplete. Ambiguous photographs and scenes resistant to explanation helped keep Hiroshima from being confined to a single, legible image.

Seven Rivers and Photobook Sequencing — History Through Repetition

In Here Goes River, the seven rivers crossing Hiroshima’s delta are both locations and a model of time that does not move in one direction. Akaaka describes the book as a current whose snapshots reveal relations between history and the present, society and the individual, while moving backward and forming eddies^*7. Fujioka and Himeno initially shaped a sequence with narrative in mind. Matsumoto interrupted that explanatory flow and included blurred or indeterminate photographs that were difficult to judge as conventionally “good snapshots”^*3. Bicycles, children, rivers, bodies, and the Atomic Bomb Dome recur on separated pages without being assigned one-to-one meanings. The Ina Nobuo Award jury praised juxtapositions in which contemporary bicycles and floodwaters evoke archival images of the bombing and the rivers of August 6, 1945^*6. Past and present are not equated. Repetition across distant pages allows the past to be recalled through contemporary scenes.

From Film to Digital — How to Select from an Overwhelming Number of Images

Here Goes River was also made while Fujioka was moving from film to digital cameras. She has described the change in equipment as a shift that transformed both how she photographed and how she presented images—changing the basic character of her process^*3. Once the number of exposures became enormous, the work could no longer be determined by the finish of individual pictures alone. Decisions about what to retain and which ambiguous images to include assumed greater weight. Years of walking through Hiroshima produced photographs containing not just intended subjects but also elements that had entered the edge or background of the frame by chance. During later selection, the distance became clear between the Hiroshima she thought she understood while photographing and the city that emerged from the accumulated images.

Life Studies — New York Found Thirteen Years Later

Life Studies, published in 2025, draws on photographs made during roughly five years in New York beginning in 2007 and selected after a long interval. According to Akaaka, the book contains 168 color and black-and-white images made between streets and rooms, moving from an initial encounter with the city through the wandering of an immigrant and toward increasingly private scenes^*11. Fujioka has said that the book took about thirteen years to complete. Although its basic structure emerged early, she repeatedly added and removed images and revised the text until shortly before printing^*4. Her observation that photographs once made simply to relieve boredom later became important shows that the judgments formed at exposure did not determine the finished work^*4. Children, interiors, shadows, objects, and minor incidents in the street take precedence over emblematic views of New York, and the period of living there unfolds through a sequence that moves from public streets toward private space.

Photography as a Record — Old Photographs and Local Memory in Oda

Fujioka’s current activities include “Oda Minzoku Kotohajime,” a community project developed with residents of Oda in Kawachi, Higashihiroshima. In photography workshops, she encouraged participants to photograph whatever interested them in familiar places—the home or garden—instead of searching far away for exceptional subjects. The project also collected old local photographs. Conversations around a single image drew out different memories from different people, including details of work, customs, and daily life that rarely survive in official local histories^*2. Fujioka has said that if photographs and words are not preserved, local events may come to seem as though they never happened^*2. The aim is not one image that stands for a grand history, but multiple accounts preserved through photographs before personal memories disappear. The project differs in form from Here Goes River, yet it makes explicit the same refusal to place ordinary life outside history.

Photobooks and Exhibitions — A Fixed Book, a Changing Installation

Fujioka does not repeat the same sequence in a photobook and an exhibition. She explains that installations can be adjusted according to wall height, the scale of the room, the viewing route, and how images appear in the space; this makes the exhibition an experimental form^*4. In a photobook, the size of each image and the order of pages are fixed in print, and a single viewer can turn through them repeatedly. The flow developed through the exhibition of I Don’t Sleep became the basis of the book. In Here Goes River, exchanges with the designer broke apart an explanatory narrative. In Life Studies, thirteen years of selection reached a fixed form. Walls and the viewer’s movement alter relationships between photographs in an exhibition; format and page order determine the pace of looking in a book. Fujioka treats them as distinct constructions, not as two presentations of an identical sequence.

Comment te dire adieu — A Work Made from an Unplanned Journey

Comment te dire adieu gathers early photographs made while moving through Taiwan, Europe, Brazil, and other places. It received the Visual Arts Photo Award Grand Prix in 2004^*1. The journey began before a photographic plan had formed, leaving many images of people, children, bodies, signs, and opaque encounters found by chance in the street instead of explanations of landmarks or local culture^*2. Selection after her return foregrounded the people and scenes to which she had responded abroad rather than the itinerary itself. The method—giving greater weight to what is discovered later in a photograph than to the purpose present at exposure—continues from this early work through Life Studies.

I Don’t Sleep — Private Photographs Without Explaining the Family

Published by Akaaka in 2009, I Don’t Sleep places photographs of Fujioka’s family and family home in Kure within a large-format book. Editor Nozomi Himeno has recalled that although such private snapshots were often viewed through the discourse of onnanoko shashin (“girl photography”), Fujioka’s photographs contained both a perspective that surveyed individual scenes and the pressures surrounding women’s lives in regional Japan^*3. Pages enlarging the crown of her mother’s head, working hands, her back, and domestic objects do not explain family relations. They hold together a gaze that wants to move closer and another that keeps its distance. Through scale and sequence, the book foregrounds the continuing unknowability of a familiar person more than the disclosure of private life.

Here Goes River — Encountering History in Present-Day Hiroshima

Akaaka published Here Goes River in 2017. The work received the 41st Ina Nobuo Award for fiscal year 2016, followed in 2018 by the Tadahiko Hayashi Award and the Kimura Ihei Photography Award^*1. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum holds chromogenic prints from the series made between 2013 and 2017^*9. The Tadahiko Hayashi Award account praises Fujioka’s restrained photographs made while walking through the city across all four seasons, in which memories of the past surface within unremarkable scenes of present-day life^*10. Repeated contemporary images make history felt inside the everyday without reenacting the bombing. The sequence was recognized as a way of picturing Hiroshima in the present, distinct from earlier “Hiroshima” photography centered on the bombing’s direct traces.

Life Studies — Suspending the Judgment Made at the Time of Exposure

Published in 2025, Life Studies comprises 192 pages, 168 color and black-and-white photographs, and a long text by Fujioka^*11. She did not publish the New York photographs immediately. Work in Hiroshima intervened before she selected the earlier images more than a decade later. An eggplant and domestic objects that she had photographed to relieve boredom eventually became important records of her life at the time^*4. As with the early journeys, the family in Kure, and the rivers of Hiroshima, the moment of exposure does not coincide with the completion of the work. The mismatch between an image’s initial assessment and its later selection becomes one of the book’s organizing conditions.

Early Work Beyond “Girl Photography”

Fujioka began working in the 1990s and has recalled being invited to speak as one of the photographers associated with onnanoko shashin, or “girl photography”^*4. The experience later led her back to negatives from her student years. In the 2021 exhibition Hana no Yukue and the 2022 project New Stories, she gathered subjects she had repeated unconsciously since that period—children and flowers among them—and reconsidered why she takes photographs^*13. She can be compared with contemporary women photographers such as Yurie Nagashima, Rinko Kawauchi, and Asako Narahashi. Fujioka’s work, however, is distinguished by a time scale that repeatedly returns to decades of photographs involving travel, family, regional cities, and the history of Hiroshima. Images from her student years were presented in Hana no Yukue and New Stories through categories different from those of her later works.

Whose Point of View Has Street Photography Used to Picture the City?

Street photography developed as a major form of modern photography by recording chance events and human gestures in public space without staging them. In the 1930s, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed fleeting arrangements of moving people and urban space, and his work became closely associated with the idea of the “decisive moment”^*20. In postwar Japan, photographers who had lived through occupation, rapid urbanization, and political upheaval treated the street as a site of social change. Around PROVOKE in the late 1960s, grain, blur, camera shake, and contingent framing challenged the assumption that photography could describe the world clearly and neutrally^*21. The 1968 exhibition A Century of Photography had already raised public questions about photographers’ wartime responsibility and the credibility of documentary images; Takuma Nakahira and Kōji Taki, who participated in editing the exhibition, went on to launch PROVOKE^*22. Cartier-Bresson, PROVOKE, and Fujioka cannot be joined as a direct line of influence. They nevertheless provide a useful comparison for tracing how street photography’s concerns expanded from seizing an instant in public space to considering the photographer’s own position and historical relationship to a place.

The “Reflexive Turn” — From Where Does Aya Fujioka Photograph Hiroshima?

Yoshiaki Kai argues that Japanese street photography after 1990 underwent a “reflexive turn,” incorporating the photographer’s own relationship to the place photographed; he cites the Hiroshima works of Aya Fujioka and Keiko Sasaoka as examples^*15. “Reflexive” here means that the image addresses not just what a city looks like, but who is photographing it, from what position, and with what relation to the place. Canonical accounts of street photography have often presented anonymous passersby and fleeting incidents as scenes discovered in public space. For Fujioka, who was born in Kure and later returned to live in Hiroshima, the street is not a detached field of observation. Her private photographs of family in Kure and her street photographs of Hiroshima’s rivers and roads do not belong to separate domains. High school students dancing in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, play along the river, and rooms crowded with household objects register the city’s present alongside the experience of return, family memory, and the distance produced by living amid Hiroshima’s history. Fujioka retains the sensation of the “instant” she admired as a student while selecting, years later, elements she did not consciously notice at exposure. Because selection continues long after the shutter is released, the work’s meaning is not completed in that instant; her relation to the place becomes visible over time^*4. In Here Goes River, chance encounters in the street become a form capable of including the photographer’s own belonging and memory.

Things She Carries — Approaching War Through Life in the Present

The 2023 exhibition Things She Carries at SEIZAN Gallery in New York brought together Miné Okubo, Aya Fujioka, and Yukiko Hata. It considered how the Second World War has been represented and how its history remains within the experience of women living in the present^*16. The exhibition introduced Here Goes River as a project that began as a personal record through which Fujioka sought to recover a relationship with her hometown, then turned toward photographing the contemporary city instead of a “Hiroshima” fixed as a sign of catastrophe. At an artist talk in New York, it was reported that a photograph of high school students practicing a dance in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome had been criticized on social media for dishonoring the victims’ memory^*17. Fujioka explained that without the Dome the image would not carry the same meaning, and that she wanted the symbols contained in the photograph to prompt viewers to think instead of imposing a single lesson. Her report that the same image drew no backlash when shown in Tokyo demonstrates how reception changes with the location of an exhibition. In a different response, the World Socialist Web Site argued that the 2025 London exhibition hiroshima, by treating war through everyday life and personal memory, risked pushing the political and historical causes of the atomic bombing into the background^*19. In Here Goes River, everyday life does not replace history. The act of photographing the present brings the work into an active dispute over what Hiroshima should preserve as memory.

Compared with Ken Domon’s Hiroshima — Where Does History Appear in a Photograph?

Ken Domon photographed Hiroshima in 1957 and published the photobook Hiroshima the following year. The Met describes the book—containing survivors, hospitals, an orphanage, people blinded by the bombing, and families rebuilding their lives—as a major work in the history of Japanese photobooks^*24. Writing about Here Goes River, ARTnews JAPAN observed that Fujioka evokes the “Hiroshima” latent within quiet daily scenes, including high school students dancing in front of the Dome and elementary school pupils looking in the same direction, through a method different from Domon’s^*25. Their difference cannot be reduced to direct versus indirect expression, or to a contest between an older realism and a newer approach. Domon’s photographs include hospital and family life; Fujioka’s contain the Atomic Bomb Dome as an explicit historical sign. The distinction becomes clearer when asking where the history of the bombing appears in the image. Domon centered wounded bodies and ongoing damage, demonstrating that the atomic bombing had not become past. Fujioka photographed Hiroshima more than seventy years later, when people playing by the river, dance practice, school commutes, family life, and historical signs coexist within the same urban time. Here Goes River does not make the damage invisible. It uses distance and recurrence between photographs to register the past in a period when its direct traces have become harder to distinguish from everyday life.

Awards and Reassessment — Questions That Continue Beyond Hiroshima

After Here Goes River received three awards, Fujioka presented New Stories, selected from earlier negatives; Hana no Yukue, based on photographs of flowers made over many years; and Life Studies, drawn from her New York archive. The 2023 Higashikawa Awards New Photographer Award considered several of these recent activities, including New Stories, a group exhibition addressing third-wave feminism, and Hana no Yukue^*13. From 2024, I Don’t Sleep appeared in I’m So Happy You Are Here and related exhibitions reassessing Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to the present^*3. In 2025, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum included Fujioka among the contemporary artists in its thirtieth-anniversary exhibition^*12. That year, The Guardian introduced Here Goes River as a series in which the weight of the past remains within the everyday life of contemporary Hiroshima^*14. Reception now extends beyond Here Goes River to her early family photographs, selections from old negatives, and New York work.