from the series Apartment

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Artist Ishiuchi Miyako(Japanese, born 1947)Japanese, born 1947

CultureJapanese

Titles

from the series Apartment

Date1977–1978, printed 1978

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 20 × 24 3/4 in. (50.8 × 62.9 cm)
Overall: 20 × 24 3/4 × 7/8 in. (50.8 × 62.9 × 2.2 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment

Object number2014.707

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionWith a background in textiles, Miyako Ishiuchi has always been drawn to the personal, ritual aspects of photography. She chose to work at a radically large scale for photography in the 1970s. She returned to her hometown of Yokosuka when she first began making photographs, and ultimately created three deeply personal bodies of work there, exploring the fiction of memory of place and time. She published each of the resulting series, Apartment (1978), Cry, Yokosuka Story (1979), and Endless Night (1981), as photobooks. She felt the psychological imprint of her childhood in dark, gritty Yokosuka. In Apartment, she scrutinized memories of lives spent in close quarters in these cramped, crumbling postwar apartment complexes. Ishiuchi grew up in a similar apartment, with her family of four coexisting in one room. She saw in these apartment buildings invisible traces, an index of lives she could have lived. Apartment conveys the dirt, detritus, and desires of human life as well as the passage of time. Ishiuchi produced these dark, grainy images by rocking the prints in developing trays to gradually build up the density of printed depth and layers of personal meaning.
ProvenanceArtist, Japan, 1978; Thrid Gallery Aya; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 2014
Exhibition HistoryApartment, Nikon Salon, Ginza, Tokyo, 1978.

“For A New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979 Japan,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 8–July 12, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed on verso in black ink upper left panel: [signature] / 1978.

Inscribed on verso right panel in red ink: 16 [circled]

Signed on verso upper left panel, black ink: Miyako Ishiuchi

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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