Yurie Nagashima

Nagashima entered art school hoping to become a film director. Unable to enroll in the film program she wanted, she studied visual communication design instead. Photography was a required course, and she recalls that her work began when she acquired a used Nikon FE^*1. In the summer of her second year, she left for Europe with an assignment from a teacher to “photograph Japanese people.” Realizing that she herself was Japanese, she began making self-portraits with a tripod^*1. Her move into nude photography the following year grew partly from her experiences acting and modeling in films and photographs made by male friends at art school. Nagashima later recalled that the female roles she was asked to play followed types drawn from the makers’ fantasies and left her feeling that she herself was not being seen^*4. After she became known as an artist, established male photographers also asked her to model, but she felt that accepting such requests would contradict her own work^*4. Her resistance to the contemporary Japanese “hair nude” boom also led her to look for a way to separate the female nude from male sexual desire^*1. She arrived at the idea of photographing her entire family naked while they went about ordinary activities. She has explained that she saw family as the relationship least readily associated with sex and chose to photograph everyday acts in the nude^*1. In 1993, these self-portraits with her family were recognized at PARCO’s Urbanart competition, bringing Nagashima wider attention^*2. Her early work was introduced through terms such as “self-nude” and was later folded retrospectively into the category of “girly photo,” which spread in the late 1990s. Nagashima has pointed to the timing of her debut and her move to the United States in 1995 to argue that she did not originally belong to a single group of that kind^*1. By the mid-1990s, the sight of young women carrying cameras was itself being reported as a new cultural phenomenon. A 1996 Frieze article described the simultaneous attention given to diary-like snapshots and “girly culture,” noting that, with the emergence of Nagashima and Hiromix, young women carrying many kinds of cameras were taking to the streets^*35. Age and gender often came before distinctions between the artists’ methods. Anthropologist Gabriella Lukacs argues that, during the recession following the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy, male critics read photographs of family and friends by women as a feminine effort to restore lost social bonds. The women making the photographs, meanwhile, were turning to photography in order to build working lives of their own, away from expectations that wives and mothers should sustain those relationships^*27. At a time when women were trying to build careers in photography, their photographs were often treated as evidence of a supposedly feminine capacity to maintain domestic and social ties. Jane Simon and Mio Bryce, comparing Nagashima with Rinko Kawauchi, likewise examine how judgments about domestic subjects, familiar surroundings, and photographic technology fed criticism that described women photographers as “immature” or “intuitive”^*28. After language study in Seattle, Nagashima entered the graduate program at the California Institute of the Arts. She has said that critique classes trained her to articulate her own work and changed her belief that photographs could communicate without explanation^*1. In 2001, PASTIME PARADISE received the Kimura Ihei Award^*9. Later, while pregnant and raising a child, she encountered discrimination around combining work with the roles expected of her as a mother. That experience led her back to the study of sociology and feminism^*1. Her 2017 solo exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum brought together early self-portraits and family photographs, 1990s youth culture, her years in the United States, the plant series made in Switzerland in 2007, and works concerned with women’s life courses^*2. In 2020, she published “Bokura” no “onna no ko shashin” kara watashitachi no girlie photo e, based on research into photographic discourse from 1990 to 2014. The artist who had made the photographs now turned to the history of the words that had been used to explain them^*3.

Occupying Both Sides of the Camera

Nagashima’s self-portraits make the subject standing before the tripod and the photographer who sets the conditions and releases the shutter the same person. She has explained that photographing nudes of herself—images she would have found difficult to ask someone else to make—allowed her to decide the place, time, clothing, pose, and exact moment of exposure^*4. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum holds the 1993 Self-Portrait (Family #26) as a gelatin silver print from her self-portrait series^*5. Nagashima later said that this method allowed her to rearrange the conventional division between a male photographer and a female model and to assert that her body belonged to her^*4. Nagashima has suggested that these photographs might be understood as records of performances: she has played roles, staged scenes, and moved between lived situations and constructed ones^*4. The “self” in the frame is both evidence of a lived private life and a figure performing a role set by the photographer. Discussing the 1994 Tank Girrrl, Nagashima has said that she was trying to become Tank Girl, the popular comic-book character of the time, using a cigarette, septum piercing, eye patch, and T-shirt to play another person^*29. In an interview with the British Journal of Photography, she distinguished between “Myself,” grounded in lived experience, and the staged “Self Portrait,” while stressing that both were performative^*30. In the same interview, she recalled that she did not disclose every personal circumstance behind the work; photography could express her while also allowing those circumstances to remain concealed^*30. Speaking to i-D in 2023, she said that playing a role during the shoots offered distance from problems in everyday life, and that the feeling of teasing men in particular was liberating^*31.

Testing Habits of Looking Through Family Nudes

The family photographs were conceived to test the habit of automatically linking nudity with sex. Nagashima has explained that she considered family the relationship least readily associated with sexuality and devised scenes in which everyone would “do ordinary things while naked”^*1. A known family relationship, routine gestures, and the strong sign of the nude occupy the same image, forcing the photograph to hold competing ways of reading the body. As an art student, Nagashima had modeled in works by male friends and felt that she was being made to play women drawn from the makers’ fantasies, without being seen as herself^*4. In the family self-portraits, she moved back and forth across the tripod and decided the location, clothing, pose, and moment of exposure^*4. The structure removed a fixed separation between photographer and photographed subject and gave her control over how nudity entered the image. “Family” in Nagashima’s work did not simply affirm blood ties. During a period of estrangement from her family of origin, she came to regard friends she had chosen as her real family, and empty white room records those friends, underground parties, and time spent at the edges of the city^*29. Kazoku and empty white room show two different lived worlds: the family into which she was born and the friends she came to experience as family. Critic Jörg Colberg has compared Masahisa Fukase and Nagashima because both used the title Family and both appeared in the same frames as their relatives^*33. Fukase repeatedly photographed his family from the 1970s through the 1980s using the group-portrait format of the studio where his father had long worked as a photographer. Young women who were not family members joined some of the portraits, and later images included photographs of his deceased father and niece within the group^*34. Nagashima’s 1993 work was made at home. Her entire family performed ordinary actions while naked, she entered the frame herself, and a self-timer allowed her to determine the conditions of the photograph^*1. Fukase returned to a fixed studio format and layered it with changes in family relationships, illness, and death. Nagashima set a scene in which the entire family was nude, altering both the sexual conventions attached to nudity and the division between photographer and model. Colberg contrasts the cynicism he finds in Fukase’s work with Nagashima’s use of the camera’s liberating potential to speak about her own family relationships^*33. Nagashima has said that she did not know Fukase’s Family when making her early work, so there is no basis for describing the two as a direct line of influence^*23. The shared title therefore sharpens a difference in method: Fukase repeated the conventions of the studio portrait, while Nagashima staged a nude family scene at home and controlled it herself. Each artist occupied a different position within the family image and constructed the scene in a different way.

Using Photography to Investigate What She Does Not Yet Understand

Nagashima has used photography to investigate things she does not yet understand. In a 2016 interview, she said that she chooses subjects connected to social issues and wants the work to generate discussion^*23. In the same interview, she described photography as a way to examine what she cannot understand and compared memory to a box full of photographs rather than a sequence arranged in chronological order^*23. For her, photographing is less a single act that resolves a question than a process of observing, recognizing, and coming to accept^*23. Family, home, and the body recur across different periods, with the same subjects photographed differently as life changes.

From a Single Self-Image to the Time of a Life

Nagashima’s self-portraiture extends far beyond a handful of nude images from the 1990s. She made more than 600 photographs between 1992 and 2016, later reworking them into a slide show of about thirty minutes^*4. The body in the photographs changes through youth, pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and aging; photographing the same person over many years becomes a form in itself^*7. Nagashima has said that changes in her body and changes in her work have moved together^*8. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s official profile lists the 2004 photobook not six among her major publications, and the 2017 exhibition placed her long-term self-portraits alongside works concerned with women’s life courses^*2. In the slide show and the photobooks, bodies from different periods appear in sequence. The life that unfolds cannot be contained by a single label such as “nude,” “mother,” or “young woman.”

From Her Own Body to Women’s Memories of War

After giving birth, Nagashima’s attention expanded from her own experience and that of her family to the lives of other women. In Senninbari, made in 2004 and first presented in 2005, she recreated on one of her own shirts the wartime practice in which women sewed protective thousand-stitch objects for family members leaving for military service, inviting about 660 women to add a stitch^*21. At a day-care center next to her son’s nursery school, she interviewed women who remembered the war and recorded them on video. The exhibition also assembled Polaroids of the participants’ faces and hands as they sewed^*21. Nagashima has explained that the September 11 attacks occurred while she was pregnant in 2001, followed by the war in Afghanistan, and that giving birth amid those events made it harder to regard war as something unrelated to her own life. Questions about her child’s future began to enter the work^*21. At the Chihiro Art Museum’s Life exhibition, the work appeared in the same space as video interviews with people who had experienced the war, presenting individual handwork as a way of speaking about wartime memory^*26. A body of work that began with Nagashima’s own body in self-portraiture opened, in Senninbari, toward the handwork and testimony of women who had lived through wartime. Her method shifted from appearing in the image herself to listening to and recording time experienced by others.

Examining the Name “Girly Photo”

Nagashima’s examination of the term “girly photo” grew from repeated experiences of having her body and her work explained in other people’s words. She has said that from around junior high school she felt uneasy as her body and behavior were pressed toward expectations of “femininity,” and she identifies reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex at eighteen as her first encounter with feminism^*7. As a young woman, however, Nagashima did not think of herself as a feminist. In a 2021 statement for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, she recalled that the feminists she saw on television seemed to be older scholars and activists. That image did not connect with her own difficulty living as a woman or with her sense that she could not easily build solidarity or join a movement^*22. Over time, she began to reread the questions that had repeatedly appeared in her work—body, family, labor, and the roles expected of her as a mother—through the language of feminism^*22. Discrepancies in language had already shaped the reception of her work. In 1993, after seeing a slide show by Nan Goldin and a talk with Nobuyoshi Araki at PARCO, Nagashima asked Goldin how she built relationships intimate enough to photograph private moments between people close to her. A later critical book retold the question as a desire to photograph people having sex, a version that conflicted with Nagashima’s memory^*36. A question about intimacy had been rewritten as a story about a young woman and sex. Nagashima’s early self-portraits had themselves been made in response to the way a male-dominated society looked at women’s bodies^*4. The works were later discussed under the name “girly photo” and associated with technical immaturity, intuition, youth, and femininity. Nagashima objected to the way artists with different methods were grouped by gender and judged through old male/female binaries and unverified claims about their private lives^*18. Reading the 2010 book “Onna no ko shashin” no jidai became a direct impetus for constructing her own response. After meeting Yuki Senda through a study group led by Chizuko Ueno, which she had attended since 2007, Nagashima entered graduate school in 2011^*18. She has said that the aim of her book was less to blame individual critics than to make it possible for herself, and for others who think of themselves as “girls,” to speak without sacrificing their self-respect^*18. In graduate school, she collected magazines and books published between 1990 and 2014 and used discourse analysis to examine how the repeated circulation of the same explanations produced the category “girly photo”^*1. In 2014, she led an ISSP workshop in Latvia titled “Photography as a Subversive Tactic: Being the Other”^*32. In the same interview, she also said that she dislikes being classified under a single name^*23. In the early work, she set the conditions and made her own self-portraits. Later, she returned to the magazines, books, and criticism that had explained her work and that of her contemporaries. Both in making photographs and in examining language, she chose to verify things herself rather than leave their explanation to others.

Plants as a Way Back to Her Grandmother’s Creative Life

In the 2007 series SWISS, flowers, plants, and interior spaces moved to the center of the frame. Shortly before the residency in Switzerland, Nagashima found among her late grandmother’s belongings a large group of flower photographs made about twenty-five years earlier, along with materials for pressed flowers. She has said that this was the first time she recognized in her grandmother, who had been a housewife, a creative drive similar to her own^*19. Her grandmother had continued gardening and observing plants, leaving behind photographs and pressed flowers, but this work had never been recognized as a professional artistic career and remained within the home. Nagashima took her grandmother’s flower photographs with her when she traveled to a residency in Switzerland with her young son, where she photographed local plants, the rooms in which they stayed, and their life together^*19. Plants became both a new subject and a way to trace the gaze of her late grandmother and the creative work one woman had sustained inside the home. That concern later continued in past, perfect, progressive., made with her grandmother’s belongings, and in questions about the standards that separate the “professional” from the “amateur”^*1. 黄色い野生の花 from SWISS is held by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum as a 2007 chromogenic print^*12. Critic Noi Sawaragi read the 2010 SWISS+ as a transformation of Nagashima’s first exhibition, Ai no Heya, arguing that the focus had shifted from photographs that showed family relationships to the question of how to photograph relationships as they come apart through death and separation^*38. As Nagashima incorporated her grandmother’s photographs and pressed flowers into the work, creative activity left inside the home and the boundary between “professional” and “amateur” became subjects in their own right.

Building Relationships with Strangers Through Conversation and Exchange

From 2015 onward, Nagashima began to include in her work the process through which a relationship with someone not yet close to her takes shape. During the KIITO residency project 縫うこと、着ること、語ること。, she invited women in Kobe to contribute clothes they “wanted to throw away but could not,” listened to the stories attached to them, photographed the women wearing the garments, and gathered materials through exchanges involving her own used clothes and photographs^*24. The collected clothes were turned into a large tarp in collaboration with her partner’s mother and exhibited with the photographs^*24. Photographing, listening, exchanging objects, and sewing with another woman all belonged to the same work. The early family photographs used existing relationships to rearrange the roles of photographer and subject. Here, relationships with women she did not know were built through conversation and exchange, and the time required to form those relationships became part of the work.

From Spaces for Photographs to Spaces of Care

Nagashima’s use of materials beyond photography and of collaborative processes increased in the 2010s. Her concern with how viewers move through a space and in what order they encounter photographs, however, can be traced back to her first exhibition, Ai no Heya, in 1994. A room covered in red fur contained a television, a sofa, and nudes of the artist; beyond a curtain, family nudes were arranged in a dark, narrow space^*20. The place and sequence in which bodies were seen mattered as much as the selection of photographs. In about home, objects made with her mother and photographs of different sizes occupied the space, while her grandmother’s flower photographs and family memories became material for considering domestic life, women’s creative work, and the boundary between professional and amateur^*10. In the 2020 exhibition B&W, Nagashima showed 8×10 photograms made by placing pressed flowers inherited from her grandmother directly on photographic paper, as well as landscapes printed on wooden boards coated with photographic emulsion; she made both in the darkroom herself^*11. Discussing the photograms in past, perfect, progressive., she described the use of silhouettes as a way to open photography—so often dominated by vision—to the viewer’s imagination^*8. For the 2023 project ケアの学校, she opened the exhibition space as her own studio and created a place where participants could learn about “care” through talks, presentations, reading groups, a flea market, tea gatherings, and other activities^*25. A space for looking at artworks became a place for talking with others, learning, and sharing time. One source for this development was the death of her dog Punk in 2021^*31. Nagashima has recalled that, in a relationship with a dog involving little verbal communication, what she missed most after his death was simply his presence during ordinary time. She came to think of care as something that can consist both of heavy responsibility and of “simply being there”^*31. In the exhibition, she included a photograph of the back of her head, with her hair dyed the same color as Punk and tied with a ribbon he had worn, using a personal loss as a point of entry into a conversation about care^*31. A 2024 checklist from the National Museum of Western Art includes photographs, drawings on postcards, and works made with human hair, dog hair, wool, yarn, and paper^*17. The spatial construction that began with Ai no Heya in 1994 later expanded to include inherited objects, handwork, and collaboration.

Early Attention Came with Doubts About Her Status as a Photographer

Nagashima’s early work received substantial press, but attention did not automatically amount to recognition as an artist. Writing in Studio Voice in 1995, Kotaro Iizawa declined to place Nagashima alongside Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, or Nobuyoshi Araki. He suggested that she might not yet be called a “photographer,” while praising the enthusiasm of a twenty-year-old “girl” and describing her technique as an “awkward hand”^*20. Even after the PARCO award, whether she qualified as a “photographer” remained a subject of criticism. The following year, Frieze placed sixteen women photographers within a trend of diary-like snapshots and “girly culture,” discussed young women photographing themselves and their surroundings, and ended by asking whether love or narcissism lay behind the camera^*35. The same article welcomed the shift of women from objects of the camera to subjects behind it while still discussing their work collectively through age and gender^*35. Tokyo Art Beat has described how the 1993 family photographs drew a strong response and how the work continued to be read, often with misunderstanding, through the categories of “hair nude” and “girly photo”^*6. Nagashima’s first solo exhibition at a public museum, held at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2017, brought together roughly a quarter century of work, from early nudes to plants, domestic life, and collaborative projects. In doing so, it offered a broader account of an artist who had long been reduced to a few provocative images^*2. A RealTokyo review of her 2020 book argued for reconsidering the discourse around women photographers and returning evaluation to the actual viewing and discussion of the works^*13. Nagashima attracted attention early, but for many years her work reached the public through names such as “hair nude” and “girly photo.” The 2017 retrospective and the 2020 book examined that distance through different means: exhibition-making and archival research.

The Same Private Life, Different Photographic Methods

In mid-1990s Tokyo, diary-like snapshot photography and “girly culture” drew attention at the same time, while the names Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, and Wolfgang Tillmans were also becoming widely familiar in the art world^*35. Nagashima and Hiromix were placed at the center of the same phenomenon, and Frieze described Hiromix as a photographer of herself and her friends^*35. Nagashima’s point of departure was different: a tripod, a self-timer, and the decision to stage her entire family nude^*1. Although the artists shared an attention to nearby life, Nagashima kept two questions at the center of the work: who constructed the scene, and who occupied the position of being looked at. Comparing her with Rinko Kawauchi, Jane Simon and Mio Bryce distinguish Nagashima’s “feminist politics of looking” from Kawauchi’s cumulative “poetics of looking”^*28. Both turn the camera toward domestic and everyday life, but the study emphasizes the gendered problem of “looking/being looked at” in Nagashima and the visual rhythm created by accumulating fragments of daily life in Kawauchi. A difference from Nan Goldin also appears in the question Nagashima asked her in 1993. The question concerned how to build relationships intimate enough to photograph friends’ private moments, not sex itself^*36. Nagashima placed herself and her family inside the frame, addressing intimacy and control over the conditions of the photograph within the same work. A 2018 comparative study placed Nagashima alongside the Chinese photographer Luo Yang, citing film, familiar surroundings, and relationships with close subjects as points of contact^*37. The study notes that Nagashima repeatedly photographs herself, her family, her husband, and her son, while Luo Yang photographs friends and women with whom she feels an affinity as an extended family beyond blood ties^*37. All of these artists work with nearby life, but the relation between photographer and subject differs across Nagashima’s self-performance, Hiromix’s snapshots of friends, Kawauchi’s fragments of the everyday, and Luo Yang’s portraits of friends.

From a 1990s Phenomenon to a Cross-Generational History of Photography

Recent international exhibitions have placed Nagashima beyond the 1990s category of “girly photo” and within a longer history of women photographers in Japan. Aperture’s 2024 publication I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now brought together twenty-five artists across generations and included Nagashima’s photographs and writing in a reconsideration of Japanese photographic history^*14. For the 2025 presentation at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, the pregnancy self-portrait Full-figured, yet not full-term was selected as one of the exhibition’s press images^*15. In a 2024 exhibition at the National Museum of Western Art, more than twenty contemporary artists and groups, including Nagashima, responded through their work to the question of whether the museum had been a place capable of nurturing the art of the future^*16. Nagashima is increasingly being revisited from two directions: the history of women photographers in Japan from the postwar period to the present, and contemporary art that moves across photography, materials, and writing^*14. The family nudes remain an important point of departure. Over more than three decades, she has continued to work with three related methods: photographing herself and her family, structuring lived time through photobooks, and using archives to examine the names and explanations attached to her work.