I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now at the International Center of Photography redraws the history of Japanese photography through the work of more than twenty-five women across seven decades. On view from October 15, 2026, to January 11, 2027, the exhibition gathers photography, photobooks, installation and printed matter into a single account of artistic practice that has often been left at the margins of the canon.
The range of artists is one of the show’s strengths. Works by Ishiuchi Miyako, Katayama Mari, Kawauchi Rinko, Sugiura Kunié, Yanagi Miwa, Sawada Tomoko, Shiga Lieko and Noguchi Rika appear alongside those of other intergenerational figures, creating a timeline that moves from the 1950s to the present without flattening differences between them. Some artists approach daily life with a quiet, exacting gaze; others bring confrontation, conceptual structure or a more overtly experimental approach to the medium.
What binds the exhibition together is its insistence that women’s perspectives are not a supplement to Japanese photographic history, but central to it. The works trace domestic life, labor, identity, social roles and the conditions under which women have seen themselves and been seen by others. At the same time, they push photography into broader terrain, where books, objects and installation matter as much as the print itself.
The publication that accompanies the exhibition deepens that argument with essays, historical material and a wide bibliography of photobooks by Japanese women. That kind of editorial expansion matters here, because the project is as much about recovery as display: restoring names, practices and visual languages that have shaped the field while rarely receiving equal attention.
Curated by Pauline Vermare, Lesley A. Martin and Takeuchi Mariko in partnership with Aperture, the exhibition reads as both survey and revision. It does not simply add women to an existing story. It changes the story’s shape.
Image: Ishikawa Mao, Kin, Koza (present-day Okinawa City), Okinawa Prefecture, 1975–77; from the series Akabanaa (Red flower). Courtesy Nap Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture
Instagram 
Facebook 
Pinterest 
X / Twitter 