Words by The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a photography show this week that takes on a subject the museum hasn’t touched in decades. A Long Shadow: Postwar Japan Through the Lens opened Nov. 12 in Gallery 851 at The Met Fifth Avenue and runs through May 2, 2027. It is free with museum admission, the Met says.
It is the first show of Japanese photography at the Met in more than three decades, The Guardian reported. The exhibition brings together 15 artists from different generations, along with more than 25 books and magazines and a video installation.
What it covers
The show follows how photographers in Japan recorded the country in the decades after World War II, with a focus on the American military presence. Curator Lisa Sutcliffe told The Guardian the project began with Okinawa, a subject that brought together “military occupation, sovereignty, rupture and identity,” and widened to photographers across Japan.
Among the artists are Tōmatsu Shōmei, Ishiuchi Miyako, Ishikawa Mao, Heshiki Kenshichi and Iida Takao. Sutcliffe pointed to a 2023 acquisition, a Tōmatsu print of a woman caught between layers of chain-link fence at an American airbase in Okinawa. Fences, she said, were an important symbol for him: “porous boundaries dividing rich and poor, past and present, east and west.”
Ishikawa’s Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa (1975-77) shows women who worked as hostesses in bars frequented by Black American servicemen. Ishiuchi’s Yokosuka Story series, from the late 1970s, looks at the naval base town and the lives around it. Sutcliffe said the photographs give the view of artists, sex workers and islanders, particularly women whose stories get left out of the political and military record.
Books count too
The inclusion of photobooks and magazines is deliberate. Sutcliffe said scholarship in recent years has led museums to treat them as works in their own right and to consider “the many ways photographers conceived, sequenced and circulated their work.” The Met held a Tōmatsu exhibition in 1992 and has been building its holdings of postwar Japanese photography since.
Sutcliffe said she hopes visitors come away with “a more nuanced understanding” of the period and the lasting effect of the occupation on Japanese society. For anyone planning a New York trip this winter, the show has a long run.
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