Tokuko Ushioda潮田登久子

Biography

Tokuko Ushioda was born in Tokyo. She entered Kuwasawa Design School in 1960 and graduated in 1963 from its Living Design Department, where she majored in photography^*1. AWARE's artist biography notes that she studied at Kuwasawa with Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Kiyoji Otsuji, and that she also came into contact with photographers of the same generation such as Shigeo Gocho^*2. From 1966 to 1978 she worked as an assistant and lecturer in photography at Kuwasawa Design School and Tokyo Zokei University, and around 1975 she began working as a freelance photographer^*3. In 1976 she held her first solo exhibition, Smiling Handcuffs, at Shinjuku Nikon Salon; in 1978 she married the photographer Shinzo Shimao, and their daughter Maho was born the same year^*4. At the beginning of 1979, the family moved into a room in the former residence of Ozaki Yukio, which had been relocated to Gotokuji in Tokyo. Life in this old Western-style house later became the domestic setting behind My Husband and ICE BOX^*5. From the 1990s onward, Ushioda developed the long-term project BIBLIOTHECA, photographing books, shelves, libraries, publishing houses, and conservation spaces; in 2018 the series received the 37th Domon Ken Award, the Photographic Society of Japan's Photographer Award, and the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award^*6. In 2022, torch press published My Husband, a photobook made from family photographs taken from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, and the book received a Jurors' Special Mention at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards^*7.

Expression

Kuwasawa and Kiyoji Otsuji: beginning in a place where photographs were read

What distinguishes Ushioda's photography is not the pursuit of dramatic events, but the act of photographing objects in daily life as traces of use, touch, and time. The photographic education she received at Kuwasawa, together with the environment around Kiyoji Otsuji where students and graduates looked at photobooks and discussed photography, formed an important ground for this attitude. Ushioda recalls seeing Robert Frank's The Americans for the first time at Otsuji's house, studying it with students and graduates until they had almost "worn holes" through it, and also buying books by Paul Strand^*3. These recollections show that she encountered photography in an environment where a photograph was not only a single image, but also part of a sequence, a printed book, a structure of light and surface, and a way of looking. In relation to the photographic movements of the period, Yutaka Takanashi, one of her seniors at Kuwasawa, became involved with Provoke, while Ushioda later said that she did not feel drawn to that current and watched it from a distance^*3. The Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino leaflet also notes that it is difficult to place the early series To the Street squarely within the context of comporaphoto, even though Ushioda was close to CAMERA WORKS and the movement of independent galleries^*8. Rather than absorbing the rough grain and strong movement associated with Provoke, or the delicate urban sensibility of comporaphoto, Ushioda moved toward a practice of photographing the familiar objects of her own living environment frontally and over time.

Hesitation before photographing people, and the move toward refrigerators

Photographing people had been part of Ushioda's practice from the period when she first studied photography at Kuwasawa. In the Azamino leaflet, she recalls that in Ishimoto's class students were assigned to go out into the city, approach strangers, obtain their consent, and photograph them; she went repeatedly to Ginza, Ueno, Asakusa, and Shinjuku^*8. In the Kuwasawa interview, she explains that her first solo exhibition around 1976, Smiling Handcuffs, was held at Nikon Salon because she had accumulated photographs of people, including images made in Shinjuku, the sideshows of Asakusa, and Ginza^*3. The photographs from this period, later known as To the Street, came out of a practice of approaching people on the street and photographing them after gaining permission. Yet this method soon produced a sense of difficulty. In the Azamino leaflet, Ushioda writes that the more she learned how to photograph people, the more she began to wonder whether the camera had become a weapon, something used to hunt its target^*8; in an IMA interview, she also says that as she continued photographing people, she felt her own gaze becoming slanted and unkind toward society and others, and that Shimao told her she should value human dignity when photographing people^*9; and in a conversation published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, she recalls that as her technique improved, pointing the camera at another person came to feel like using a weapon, and that she sensed a limit in that way of photographing others^*10. The move toward refrigerators began where this hesitation toward portraiture met the concrete conditions of life in the Gotokuji room. In IMA, Ushioda explains that she tried to photograph inside and around the house as lightly as Shimao did, but felt she was merely imitating him; after stepping away from making work for a time, she looked for something she could do inside the house and began photographing the refrigerator with a 6×6 camera^*9. A refrigerator is not a face, but it is used by someone, filled with food, opened and closed, and organized according to the rhythms of a household. Her hesitation before turning the camera toward people did not remove people from her work; it redirected her attention toward the objects that retained the evidence of how people lived.

ICE BOX: seeing the household through a domestic appliance

ICE BOX began when Ushioda photographed her own refrigerator and then expanded the project to the refrigerators of relatives, acquaintances, and friends^*11. KYOTOGRAPHIE explains that she began by photographing her refrigerator as if recording her own life, then continued the project for roughly twenty years as she widened the circle of households^*12. The Azamino retrospective leaflet gives concrete details: life in the former Ozaki Yukio residence at Gotokuji, the Swedish refrigerator bought as surplus from the occupying forces, and the decision to record the objects in the room^*8. In the CCA conversation, Ushioda says that Shimao bought a large used refrigerator that had been sold near a U.S. military base, and that its sound and physical presence in the small room made her think about daily life and led her to begin photographing her days^*10. In the same conversation, she explains that she photographed refrigerators almost as if collecting insects: she shot them open and closed from the front, without tidying up the area around them, leaving slippers and household goods in the frame when they were there^*10. A refrigerator has no face or gesture, but it quietly contains food storage, shopping habits, the organization of a household, seasonal patterns, and the labor inside the home. In ICE BOX, instead of explaining a person's feelings through facial expression, the door, shelves, contents, and nearby objects show differences in how each household lives. Frontal repetition does not turn the refrigerators into anonymous industrial products; it makes the differences between their uses visible within a shared format. Regarding comparisons with Bernd and Hilla Becher, the Azamino leaflet acknowledges a shared concern with simple format and a defined subject, but stresses that Ushioda's work is not typology itself, because stories and social relations open out from the objects she photographs^*8. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum's TOP Collection: Serendipity placed Refrigerator in a section titled "Quiet Gazes, Fullness of Time," alongside works by Shigeo Gocho, Kazuo Kitai, and Shinzo Shimao, a context that helps read the series as a quiet observation of the interior of domestic life^*13.

BIBLIOTHECA: books as touched and preserved objects

In BIBLIOTHECA, begun in 1995, Ushioda's subject shifts from refrigerators to books. PGI's exhibition text explains that the series photographs books not only as carriers of information, but as things that have passed through many hands and changed over time^*14. The Nikon THE GALLERY text states that Ushioda was not drawn primarily to knowing the contents of the books, but to the beauty of bookmaking and to the presence of books as objects^*6. Her shooting notes for Shiseido Gallery include first editions, used books, damaged covers, conservation work, gloves, and experiences of photographing in stacks; they make clear that books are not only containers of content, but objects that are handled, damaged, and protected^*15. In the Kuwasawa interview, Shimao explains that, from the letters visible in the photographs, he researched authors, publication years, approximate contents, and page counts^*3. The Azamino leaflet also quotes Ushioda recalling that Shimao told her even the most ordinary thing has a story, a remark that released her from hesitation about photographing objects^*8. Here, "story" does not mean an anecdote added by the photographer. It means a specific time that becomes visible when one follows the author, publication date, publisher, traces of repair, storage space, and history of possession of the book in the photograph. In Misuzu Shobo, for example, Ushioda photographed the wooden former office building used from 1948 to 1996, its stacks, editorial rooms, editorial meetings, and empty rooms before demolition^*8. The same leaflet records her statement that Maruyama Masao's Between War and Postwar, which looked as if it had been left behind on an empty shelf, became one of the triggers for photographing books^*8. A book appears not only as a medium for reading, but as an object tied to a publishing house, editorial labor, postwar thought, repair, and the movement of collections. In this sense, BIBLIOTHECA is both still-life photography and a photography of spaces where knowledge is kept: libraries, publishers, private collections, conservation sites, and Kiyoji Otsuji's studio. Bibliotheca [#01], held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and recorded through Art Platform Japan as a gelatin silver print made in 2007 and printed in 2018, also shows that the series has entered museum collections as photographic work^*16.

My Husband: the same room, another gaze

My Husband consists of photographs of Shinzo Shimao, their daughter Maho, and life in the Western-style house at Gotokuji^*5. In the IMA interview, Ushioda explains that these photographs were not originally made for an exhibition or a book; old prints and negatives were rediscovered during a move, leading the work to be reconsidered roughly forty years later^*9. The same family life had also been photographed by Shinzo Shimao in works such as Maho-chan. In the CCA conversation, Ushioda says that because her husband had already produced a successful body of work from the same one-room life, she had not thought of presenting her own photographs, but that the images eventually gathered as My Husband were different from Shimao's photographs^*10. In the Kuwasawa interview, she describes Shimao's photographs as images that include blur, camera shake, and ambiguous contrast yet gain atmosphere in print, while she herself worked with a tripod and careful focus^*3. Even when the same room, the same family, and the same years are photographed, Shimao's pictures carry a printed atmosphere of blur and movement, whereas Ushioda's photographs preserve the arrangement of light, furniture, paper, dishes, the refrigerator, and cloth by the window.

As a photobook, My Husband is composed of two volumes: Book 1, centered on 6×6 photographs, and Book 2, centered on 35mm photographs^*17. PGI describes Book 1 as a 122-page hardcover volume, Book 2 as a 76-page softcover volume, with texts by Yuri Mitsuda and Yurie Nagashima, design by Yuri Suyama, and Japanese and English text^*18. Aperture praised the loose band that holds the two books together, one cloth-bound volume, the attention to the details of domestic space, duotone printing that reproduces the tonal range of the black-and-white photographs, and the essays by Mitsuda and Nagashima^*7. When My Husband is placed within an international photobook context, the central point is not only the quality of its bookmaking. What matters is that photographs made in a room in Tokyo from the late 1970s to the early 1980s by a woman who was at once wife, mother, and photographer—images of her husband, young daughter, refrigerator, kitchen, bedding, scraps of paper, and visitors from the photography world—came to be read, through editing forty years later, as a record of a period, a household, and a photographer's gaze. At the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, 35 books were selected from 1,026 submissions; My Husband was shortlisted in the PhotoBook of the Year category and received a Jurors' Special Mention^*19. Aperture's attention to the two-volume structure, the banded binding, the duotone printing, and the essays by Mitsuda and Nagashima indicates that the photographs made inside a household had become not a nostalgic family album, but a photobook through which readers could encounter domestic life, marriage, childrearing, and a woman photographer's viewpoint in late-1970s Japan^*7. The three major bodies of work are linked by the way initially familiar subjects—refrigerators, books, and domestic photographs—are later gathered into books and exhibitions, where they can be read as records of the household, publishing culture, and relationships among photographers.

Criticism and Reception

Ushioda's reception expanded significantly from the late 2010s through domestic awards, photobooks, and international exhibitions. The fact that BIBLIOTHECA received the Domon Ken Award, the Photographic Society of Japan's Photographer Award, and the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award in 2018 indicates that this long-term project on books came to be recognized not merely as still life or documentary record, but as one of the central works of her career^*6. The reception opened by My Husband is not only a rediscovery of family photographs. PGI explains that the work records not only Ushioda's family life and growth as an artist, but also the period in which Japanese photography, including Zeit-Foto Salon, Japan's first commercial photography gallery, was developing^*18. The same exhibition text points out that young figures who later helped shape Japanese photography, including Shigeo Gocho, critic Osamu Hiraki, and photo historian Ryuichi Kaneko, appear through Ushioda's gaze^*18. FUJIFILM SQUARE's English exhibition page also presents the publication of the photobook in 2022 as the occasion for renewed attention to photographs made roughly forty years earlier, both in Japan and abroad^*5.

When Ushioda was making the photographs that would later become My Husband and ICE BOX in the late 1970s, Japanese photography was marked by several overlapping currents: the aftermath of Provoke, comporaphoto, I-photography, commercial galleries, and photobook culture. At the same time, domestic spaces such as the home, childrearing, housework, and marriage—spaces deeply connected to women's lives—were not always treated as central terms in photographic history. Aperture's I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now presents the work of women photographers as a counterpoint, complement, and challenge to existing histories of Japanese photography, emphasizing how women looked at their own lives and at Japanese society^*20. Japan House São Paulo's Life that unfolds places Ushioda in dialogue with Rinko Kawauchi, who values Ushioda as an artist who continued working as a photographer at a time when women's social advancement was difficult and who faced everyday life with sincerity^*21. Fotomuseum Den Haag also presents the exhibition as a corrective to the Western visibility of male Japanese photographers, foregrounding observation of daily life, women's social positions, and experimentation with photographic form^*22. In roughly the same period abroad, women photographers were addressing private life and images of women in different ways. Cindy Sherman began Untitled Film Stills in 1977, restaging female images circulated through film and media; MoMA associates her work with both photography and feminist art^*23. Nan Goldin, from the late 1970s into the 1980s, shaped images of friends, lovers, children, violence, and loss into a slideshow and photobook, and MoMA describes The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as an intensely personal narrative built from the artist's own experience^*24. Ushioda's work does not restage female images as Sherman does, nor does it present an intimate community as a diary in Goldin's manner. Its distinctiveness lies in recording time spent inside the household through refrigerators, furniture, books, and the details of rooms, not as confession but as accumulated observation. For that reason, the international reception of My Husband does not mean simply that a well-made photobook was praised. It means that photographs of a Japanese household and a woman photographer's viewpoint from the late 1970s became, through the form of the photobook, an entry point through which readers elsewhere could approach a history that had often remained less visible. In ICE BOX, the repeated open and closed refrigerators show food, living arrangements, habits of organization, and differences between households. In BIBLIOTHECA, the content of a book is joined by publication dates, authors, repairs, stacks, former publishing-house buildings, and the histories of collections. In My Husband, private family photographs become, through a two-volume book, essays, and an international photobook award, documents of life and of photographic relationships in Japan from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Ushioda cannot be contained within a single category such as I-photography, object photography, photobook, or archive. Through the sustained photographing of objects inside the home, she gave family, daily life, publishing culture, and the viewpoint of a woman photographer a photographic form that could be examined later.