Mother's #36, 2002

Throughout her career, Miyako Ishiuchi has used photography as a means of connecting the past and the present, capturing both the physical and psychological traces of the passage of time. In 2000, Ishiuchi began photographing her mother, then 84, capturing close-up views of her skin, her thinning hair, and the scars from a cooking accident that covered about a third of her body. Titled 25 Mar 1916, after her mother’s birthday, the series marked the beginning of Ishiuchi’s reconciliation with her mother, a strong-willed woman who came of age in colonial Manchuria and drove a munitions truck in wartime Japan.

During the first exhibition of that series, Ishiuchi’s mother was diagnosed with liver cancer and died within a few months. As an only child, with her father already gone, the artist was left with her late mother’s belongings. In an attempt to cope with what she described as “a grief surpassing imagination,” Ishiuchi began photographing her mother’s possessions: her lipsticks and lingerie, her shoes and slippers, her dentures, and her hairbrush, still tangled with strands of her hair. In one photograph, her mother appears in a snapshot from the 1940s, young and fashionable, standing before the open door of a taxi.

Consisting of about forty photographs, including some of the earlier images of her mother’s scarred skin, the “Mother” series evokes a posthumous intimacy in which objects are transformed into potent repositories of human touch. In 2005, the series was selected for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale.