Noriko Hayashi

Beginning Photography in The Gambia

Hayashi studied international politics and conflict at university and visited The Gambia on a training program in 2006. In a later interview, she recalled visiting the independent newspaper The Point to learn more about the country. Unsure of her ability to write articles in English and not yet knowing how to use an SLR, she offered that she might be able to take photographs; that offer led directly to her work for the paper.^*22 Photography was therefore not initially a medium she had deliberately chosen in order to become a photographer. It was a practical opening that allowed her to enter a society under restrictions on speech and work alongside journalists. In a long interview with the Japan Professional Photographers Society, Hayashi described watching local reporters continue working under threats from those in power, an experience that made her think about the purpose of communicating information and led her, after The Gambia, to want a career involving media and photography.^*21 Experiencing both suppression of reporting and the work of transmitting photographs contributed to her decision to continue photography professionally. Her official biography traces the subsequent expansion of her subjects across Central Asia, the Middle East, and post-conflict societies while working as a documentary photographer based in Tokyo.^*1 She is now represented by Panos Pictures, distributing long-term projects through an international news and agency network.^*2 An English-language publication of the Japanese government likewise highlighted her sustained reporting in Kyrgyzstan when she received the Visa d’Or in 2013.^*3

Unholy Matrimony

During her 2012 reporting in Kyrgyzstan, Hayashi photographed ala kachuu, the custom in which a woman is abducted and pressured to consent to marriage. On her website, Unholy Matrimony presents a sequence that extends beyond the abduction itself to women being taken into a home, surrounded by relatives, and urged to accept the marriage.^*4 Human Rights Watch has documented how bride kidnapping continued despite its legal prohibition, sustained by social acceptance and ineffective protection.^*5 In 2013, UN Women also reported strengthened penalties, treating the gap between law and custom as an international human-rights issue.^*6 Hayashi does not leave this institutional background to written explanation alone. Her sequence incorporates rooms, relatives’ faces, and the steps of ritual through which individual women experience the practice. The series follows the period after the abduction, tracing how an initial refusal is pressured toward social acceptance. Human Rights Watch again reported in 2021 on a death connected to bride kidnapping and inadequate law enforcement, indicating that the bride kidnapping Hayashi photographed in 2012 was not a short-lived news story.^*20

The White Scarf and Family Pressure

Captions in Unholy Matrimony identify the placement of the white scarf signifying marriage and describe relatives’ efforts to persuade the woman to accept it.^*7 A gesture that might appear, in the photograph alone, as part of a wedding ceremony is connected through the caption to the woman’s refusal, family pressure, and the contradiction with legal prohibition. PBS FRONTLINE/World’s background material likewise describes bride kidnapping as a phenomenon sustained through overlapping family, community, and legal structures.^*8 Hayashi sequences persuasion inside the room, the scarf, a woman crying, and relatives’ expressions. The edit describes coercion as a process embedded in everyday ritual and family relations, not as an exceptional isolated event.

Compared with Stephanie Sinclair

At roughly the same time as Hayashi’s Unholy Matrimony, Stephanie Sinclair spent more than eight years photographing child marriage in India, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal, Ethiopia, and other countries, publishing the work as Too Young to Wed through National Geographic and the Pulitzer Center.^*25 By working across countries, Sinclair framed child marriage as a global gender issue spanning multiple societies and connected exhibitions of the photographs to education and advocacy.^*26 Hayashi concentrated on one social custom in Kyrgyzstan, following the period from the immediate aftermath of abduction through family negotiation and married life. Both photographers address institutionalized violence against women through sustained reporting, but their units of comparison differ: Sinclair constructs a transregional problem, while Hayashi describes in detail how coercion is converted into a social procedure within one locality. That difference determines the editorial structure of Unholy Matrimony.

The Yazidis and Memory

The Prayer of the Yazidis was not a project whose form had been fixed before Hayashi arrived. She has explained that a prejudicial remark about Yazidis by a Turkish friend prompted her to ask why they had been attacked and who they were, leading her to Iraq.^*21 As she stayed with families and photographed while listening to accounts of what had happened, the project expanded from present-day displacement to objects people valued, earlier family photographs, and the landscapes of their home region.^*10 Photographs limited to the immediate aftermath of violence would leave little trace of life before destruction or of the community’s own self-image. Incorporating older photographs and possessions allowed that past to be reconstructed from the memories of those who had lived it. This method—placing photographs made in the present alongside existing family images—also anticipates the later sawasawato project. In 2018, the Kyoto Museum for World Peace at Ritsumeikan University presented The Prayer of the Yazidis, bringing the work into an educational and museum setting concerned with conflict and human rights as well as the news media.^*11

sawasawato

sawasawato is a long-term project on Japanese wives who moved to North Korea through the repatriation program that began in 1959; Hayashi made twelve trips to North Korea over seven years. KYOTOGRAPHIE describes an installation combining present-day portraits of eight women with landscapes in North Korea, photographs from their youth, and places in Japan connected to memory.^*13 In a recent statement on her website, Hayashi identifies the recovery of personal memories buried beneath official histories and national narratives, through place and individual biography, as an important concern of the work.^*14 Present-day portraits alone could not account for the time lost since 1959, so older family photographs and sites of memory entered the series. Family photographs bring in the period before migration; landscapes register separation and absence; current portraits carry the time that policy between states has left in individual lives. In sawasawato, the sustained fieldwork developed in Unholy Matrimony expands from following a present situation to editing materials and places from multiple moments into an individual’s life history. Sony Imaging Gallery presented Hayashi’s recent work in 2025, indicating an exhibition circuit for long-term projects beyond festivals and museums.^*16 KYOTOGRAPHIE’s English-language materials also document the international presentation of the project through portraits, landscapes, and family photographs.^*15

Long-form Reporting and Editing

In Hayashi’s long-term reporting, time spent not pressing the shutter—and the later work of editing—are part of the method. In a 2015 conversation organized by the Japan Professional Photographers Society, she explained that she may choose not to photograph when doing so would disturb the atmosphere with a subject, and that on self-directed work she can think, “if not today, there is tomorrow,” and put the camera away.^*24 She also described making about 5,000 photographs on bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan and then selecting ten or thirty depending on the publication, emphasizing that sequence is part of how meaning is made.^*24 She has specifically said that a single image of the abduction can reduce the country to an image of “barbarism,” and that she may ask editors not to use it on its own; this is why she continued photographing women’s feelings and married lives afterward.^*24 Documentary meaning therefore resides in the accumulation, selection, and ordering of scenes over time as much as in a single “decisive moment.” A Ritsumeikan University researcher profile has related Hayashi’s method to “slow journalism,” as an alternative to short-cycle news consumption.^*12

Japanese and International Reporting Networks

When Hayashi began working in the late 2000s, Japanese photojournalism was developing routes for long-term projects alongside established newspaper and magazine reporting, including photography awards, festivals, independent magazines, and overseas agencies. In 2009, the Japan Professional Photographers Society gave an association award to DAYS JAPAN, noting its continued publication of international documentary photography during a difficult period for photojournalism.^*30 Hayashi attended the DAYS JAPAN photojournalism school and received the Natori Yōnosuke Photography Award in 2011.^*29 In 2014, Kōtarō Iizawa grouped Hayashi with Kazuma Obara and Yūsuke Hishida as a new generation of photojournalists, citing their use of international networks and their return to places after the immediate event.^*28 Unholy Matrimony subsequently received the Visa d’Or at Visa pour l’Image, moving into the international photography-festival circuit.^*17 Because outlets ranged from domestic training and awards to international festivals, agencies, and photobooks, Hayashi’s long-term reporting did not end with a single newspaper publication; it could be repeatedly re-edited at different scales. In 2015 she was selected for World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass, extending her activity from national awards into an international educational and critical network.^*18 In 2025, Life at the Crossroads: Midwives in Afghanistan received the Sony World Photography Awards Japan National Award, adding another recent international venue for her reportage.^*19 Panos’s image archive includes assignments from multiple regions, showing how individual series circulate through international photojournalism.^*9

From Long-form Reporting to Memory

Unholy Matrimony, The Prayer of the Yazidis, and sawasawato differ in subject and presentation. In Unholy Matrimony, Hayashi refused to reduce bride kidnapping to a single scene of violence; by following the subsequent persuasion and married life, she recorded the time through which a social system enters everyday life.^*24 The Prayer of the Yazidis extends beyond present displacement to personal belongings and existing family photographs, bringing life before the attack into the scope of the project.^*10 In sawasawato, portraits of Japanese wives now living in North Korea are combined with photographs from their youth, sites of memory in Japan, and North Korean landscapes.^*13 The Higashikawa Award framed this trajectory as a continuous body of work from Hayashi’s early encounter with the meaning of reporting in The Gambia to personal memories situated across the border between Japan and North Korea.^*23 Her long-term method has thus developed from sustained presence in the field toward the editing of photographs and places from multiple periods into individual life histories. In 2025, an international newspaper featured her work on a mobile medical team in Afghanistan; there too, Hayashi connected one midwife’s continuing work to the region’s broader medical conditions within a single scene.^*27