Mishima claimed to be protesting against the loss
of values in Japanese society to the advances of
technology and capitalism. Those pictures, like
those from the 1963 collectionBarakei (Killed by
Roses)of Eikoh Hosoe, once more questioned the
modern history of Japan and its relationship with
Western art history.
With the beginning of the Heisi period in 1989
with the death of Emperor Hirohito and the suc-
cession of Emperor Akihito, while domestically
Japan experienced a severe recession which caused
the closing of several magazines and photo gal-
leries, a new breed of Japanese photographer had
emerged, dealing with international artistic issues
and achieving international recognition while stay-
ing true to the deep traditions of Japanese photo-
graphy. Yasumasa Morimura became known
internationally with work that explored this set of
themes. In large-format color images, Morimura
used himself, costumed and made-up, to imitate
the major paintings of Western art history, such
asDaughter of Art History: Princess A, of 1990,
which is inspired by Velasquez’s portrait of
l’Infante Margarita of 1656. Morimura also rea-
lized a self-portrait, Doublonnage (Marcel),in
1988, in which he represents himself as a new
Rrose Se ́lavy, the portrait of French avant-garde
artist Marcel Duchamp in the guise of his female
alter-ego that was immortalized by Man Ray in
1920–21. Although working within postmodern
precepts at the end of the twentieth century, Mor-
imura’s method creates a continuity between paint-
ing and photography, a salient issue at the turn of
the nineteenth century.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, another internationally re-
nowned figure, has meditated on time and space
since 1978. Made with a wooden cabinet 810-inch
Durdorf and Sons view camera and long time expo-
sures modulated by filters to create a film speed
comparable to nineteenth century films, Sugimoto
pictures contain a disturbing poetry initially more
collected by those in the West than in Japan. Photo-
graphing in ongoing series the elaborate U.S. movie
palaces of the 1920s and 1930s, drive-in theaters,
natural history museums, wax museums, and seas
and oceans, the Zen spirit that infuses Sugimoto’s
work seems uniquely Japanese.
Toshio Shabata is another prototypical Japanese
photographer who has established a wide reputa-
tion in the West with his extraordinary, large-scale
landscape studies, often showing the earth contain-
ed or otherwise interrupted by man’s engineering
feats. His 1999 exhibitionQuintessence of Japan
established his reputation as one of Japan’s leading
contemporary photographers.
Japanese photographers historically had been
almost entirely male; in the 1980s and 1990s,
young Japanese women finally began to emerge
as creative forces, chief among these figures is
Mariko Mori. Like her colleague Yasumasa Mor-
imura, identity is one of Mori’s favorite themes.,
She also integrates into her photographic composi-
tions elements from Shintoist Buddhism:(Mirror
of the Water, 1996;Pure Land, Entropy of Loveand
Burning Desire, 1998). She often represents herself
as a sort of hybrid creature of human and machine,
a character who has perhaps stepped out of the
manga, andanimeforms so popular in Japan dur-
ing these years. Mori is also a technical innovator,
working with holographic imagery and three-
dimensional video. Since 1995, Mariko Mori has
worked on a project,Beginning of the End, that
combines space and time. At each stop during her
extensive travels, the artist takes photographs
using a 360camera, the artist herself present in
the middle of the image, held within transparent
capsule. Made up of 13 panoramic images,Begin-
ning of the End, is divided into three groups that
depict the past (Angkor, Teotihuaca ́n, La Paz,
Bolivia, Gizeh ), the present (Times Square in
New York, Shibuya in Tokyo, Piccadilly Circus
in London, and Hong Kong), and the future
(represented by ambitious development projects
La De ́fense in Paris, the city of Shangai, the Dock-
lands in London, Odaiba in Tokyo, and the con-
struction boom of post-Cold War Berlin).
The high school student Hiromix (Toshikawa Hir-
omi) became a phenomenon in Japan with her
Nobuyoshi Araki-inspired photo diary style as
young women became a greater and greater influ-
ence on the creation and consumption of photo-
graphs. A 1998 exhibitionAn Incomplete History,
attempting to capture the history of female photo-
graphers during the 130-year history of the medium,
began a two-year tour of the United States. It fea-
tured nine photographers, most of whom had been
largely overlooked, including Eiko Yamazawa, Osa-
ka’s first woman photographer who ran her own
studio from the 1930s to the 1950s; Tsuneko Sasa-
moto, known as Japan’s first female documentary
photographer; Miyako Ishiuchi, who did a pioneer-
ing series of male nudes; and Michiko Kon, a
younger artist known for her still lifes.
In the 1990s, Japanese photography saw greater
institutionalization, with the opening of the perma-
nent quarters of the Toyko Metropolitan Museum
of Photography, the founding of the Kiyosato
Museum of Photographic Arts and the Shoji Ueda
Museum of Photography, and numerous other
photography programs. The widespread use of dis-JAPAN, PHOTOGRAPHY IN