Eiko Yamazawa

Yamazawa first intended to become a painter. As a child she was familiar with sun printing and box cameras, and after graduating from the Women’s School of Fine Arts she continued to study oil painting and photography while helping to make group photographs at the Osaka YWCA^*1. Around the time of her graduation, she attended meetings connected with Hiratsuka Raichō’s movement and, through Haruko Asai at the Osaka YWCA, encountered activities concerned with the independence of working women^*11. In 1926 she went to San Francisco to study painting. After her father died that year, a camera shop introduced her to Consuelo Kanaga^*11. She learned practical camera and darkroom work in Kanaga’s studio and later worked in Nicholas Muray’s studio in New York. Through these experiences, Yamazawa chose photography as her profession^*11. She returned to Japan in 1929 and opened her own studio in Osaka in 1931^*1. After the war, she continued working at a PX in Kyoto and in the photography studio of Osaka Mitsukoshi, started the Yamazawa Photography Study Group in 1950, and reopened a commercial studio in 1952^*1. Invited by Kanaga, she returned to the United States in 1955, spent about six months in New York, and also visited Imogen Cunningham^*1. She increased her personal work while continuing commercial assignments and closed the studio in 1960^*13. Her 1962 photobook Far and Near is now understood as part of her movement toward later abstract work^*4.

Eiko Yamazawa and American Modernist Photography: Form, Light, and the Studio

In the United States, Yamazawa worked in Kanaga’s studio and in Muray’s fashion-photography studio, where she encountered modernist photography of the period^*11. To examine this formative environment, the 2019 retrospective placed her work alongside modernist photographs by Stieglitz, Strand, Adams, Weston, and Cunningham, as well as fashion and advertising photographs by Beaton, Rawlings, and Outerbridge^*2. Kanaga, with whom Yamazawa studied directly, addressed both modernist form and social subjects and in 1932 took part in the first Group f/64 exhibition with Weston, Cunningham, Adams, and others^*12. Weston and Cunningham photographed plants, bodies, and everyday objects through contour, surface, light, and form^*10. In later years Yamazawa photographed vessels, fruit, stones, bricks, and photographic equipment, moving objects, adding color and reflections, and eventually using her own earlier photographs as material^*3. Her later works continued to emphasize clear form and texture, with arrangement and lighting decided before exposure. The gap between her 1920s experiences and her mature work was long, however. From the 1950s onward, she moved toward abstraction through her own doubts about realism and a sustained process of experimentation^*11.

Why Did Eiko Yamazawa Turn to Abstract Photography?

Her move toward abstraction unfolded gradually during the 1950s. Yamazawa began using photography as a means of abstract expression in 1952–53 and intensified her personal work after returning to the United States in 1955^*11. Around that time, she wrote about asking what she truly wanted to photograph and the need to look deeply into herself^*16. Looking back later, she said that she had long been concerned with more than the pursuit of facts: she wanted to think about the relationship between human beings and photography, and had wondered whether she “could make art with a camera”^*16. Yamazawa had studied Japanese-style painting (nihonga), continued to study oil painting and photography after graduation, published Eiko Gashū in 1921, and later exhibited paper collages^*1. Her move into photography was therefore not a simple abandonment of painting; her interest in using the medium for purposes beyond recording remained. Faced with a camera that recorded everything before it, she sought photographs in which only what was true for her would remain^*16. In 1960, she described realist expression as something she had left behind and called the state in which abstract methods moved her mind a “vivid reality”^*16. In 1982, she again wrote that she wanted to bring her understanding of human beings, gained through everyday life, into expression, and described her work as an experiment in photographic expression^*16. In What I Am Doing, she continued that move away from realism through arrangement, reflection, color, and the rephotographing of her own images^*3.

The Photobook Far and Near: From Realism to Abstraction

Far and Near contains experiments from the 1950s and 1960s that precede the later What I Am Doing. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum retrospective traced Yamazawa’s formal experiments from the 1950s and presented Far and Near as a stage leading toward the work of the 1970s and 1980s^*3. In Still Life from Far and Near (1961), vessels and fruit are placed close together, making form and arrangement the center of the image^*2. Art Commons at the National Art Center, Tokyo likewise described the retrospective as tracing her formal experimentation through prewar portraits, early abstractions from the 1960s, and works from the 1970s and 1980s^*5.

How What I Am Doing Was Made: Arrangement, Light, Reflection, and Color

In What I Am Doing, Yamazawa determined the position, angle, and lighting of objects before making the exposure. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum notes that the series includes photographs of photographic equipment and earlier works, and that she kept experimenting by changing arrangement, angle, and light^*3. The Third Gallery Aya’s English biography describes her 1980s work as close to what would now be called “constructed photography”^*8. The image depended on where an object was placed, which surface faced the light, and what was layered, concealed, or made translucent. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum describes her vivid late color photographs as rare in Japan at the time^*2. Transparent Blue, made in 1986, is a dye-transfer print^*6. In Transparent Blue, translucent and opaque fields overlap, making color itself a structural element of the image.

The Meaning of What I Am Doing: Rephotographing Her Own Work

In What I Am Doing, photographic equipment and Yamazawa’s own earlier photographs became material for new images^*3. What I Am Doing No.8 (1980; printed 1986) was included in the 2019 retrospective^*2. The image shows a rolled page from one of her own 1976 photobooks; the photograph on that page had itself depicted photographic tools such as colored filters and a light box^*13. Photographic equipment becomes a photograph; the photograph becomes a page in a photobook; that page is photographed again and becomes another photograph. No.8 folds the sequence of photographing, publication in a photobook, and rephotographing into the work itself.

What Remained of Commercial and Portrait Photography in Her Later Work?

Yamazawa spent many years photographing people and products. Such work required backgrounds, poses, object placement, and lighting to be set before exposure. Arrangement and lighting also determine much of What I Am Doing. Aperture’s research emphasizes the period when Yamazawa learned studio management and portraiture under Kanaga and Muray and used portrait photography as a site of experimentation^*9. Yamazawa herself believed that a good portrait should capture something of the sitter’s inner life^*16. Although her later subjects shifted from people to objects, she continued to move beyond simply recording what stood before the camera and to make photographs from what she herself perceived. Professional studio work and What I Am Doing both relied on arranging and lighting before exposure. In the later works, those tools no longer served to present a person or product; they were used to shape relationships among form, light, and color.

Why Did Eiko Yamazawa Seem So Different from Mainstream Japanese Photography?

Yamazawa opened her own studio in Osaka in 1931^*1. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum notes that she worked on a different plane from the mainstream of Japanese photography and that her vivid late color photographs had few parallels in Japan at the time^*2. From her prewar portraits through Far and Near and What I Am Doing, she changed subjects from people to objects and photographic materials while continuing to experiment with form, arrangement, light, and color^*3. At the center of this work was the question of how a photograph could organize form, color, and light.

Why Was Eiko Yamazawa Reassessed? Exhibitions and International Reception

Yamazawa’s work had been shown internationally since the late 1980s. It appeared in Japanese Women Photographers at Lehigh University Art Gallery in 1987 and An Incomplete History: Women Photographers from Japan 1864–1997 at Visual Studies Workshop in 1998^*1. She also appeared in the 1987 documentary High Heels and Ground Glass^*1. The 2019 retrospective brought together her prewar portraits, early abstractions from the 1960s, and What I Am Doing in a single exhibition^*2. It also placed her work alongside the American modernist, fashion, and advertising photography she had encountered, avoiding an account of her development confined to Japanese photographic history^*2. In 2021, portrait photographs from the 1940s were presented within an international history of women photographers in The New Woman Behind the Camera^*7. That same year, Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker described the portraits made with Yasue Yamamoto in terms of a collaboration between performance and photography^*14. Far and Near was also included in What They Saw, a history of photobooks by women, and a spread from the book was reproduced in a FOMU review^*15. In 2024, Aperture examined Yamazawa’s studio experience under Kanaga and Muray in detail^*9. In 2025, the Shiga Museum of Art exhibition BUTSUDORI: The Photographic Expression of “Objects” placed Objects in a section devoted to form, presenting Yamazawa alongside Minoru Sakata, Kōshirō Onchi, Takeji Iwamiya, and others as an early figure in abstract expression in Japanese photography^*17. The same year, To Sway and Surround: Japanese Female Abstraction in Taipei placed her work alongside Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuyo Kinoshita, and others in a history of abstraction by women in Japan^*18. Recent exhibitions have thus approached her work through several histories at once: her position as an early professional woman photographer, portraiture, the photobook, photographs of objects, abstract photography, and Japanese abstraction.

What Did Eiko Yamazawa Change in Photography?

Yamazawa’s significance in photographic history lies in her early experiments with abstract photography in Japan and in bringing the materials and procedures of making photographs into the work itself. In What I Am Doing, objects, color, light, photographic equipment, and her own earlier photographs all became material. The work includes arrangement and lighting before exposure as well as the rephotographing of finished images. It is now being reconsidered as an early example of self-referential photography in which the image is constructed before exposure and past work becomes material for new photographs^*11. Yamazawa wrote that abstract methods moved her mind and gave her a sense of “vivid reality”^*16.