Tokuko Ushioda

Tokuko Ushioda’s Career and Life in Gotokuji

Tokuko Ushioda was born in Tokyo. She entered Kuwasawa Design School in 1960 and graduated in 1963 from its Living Design Department, where she specialized in photography.^*1 AWARE’s biography notes that she studied under Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Kiyoji Otsuji at Kuwasawa and had contact with contemporary photographers including Shigeo Gocho.^*2 From 1966 to 1978, she worked as a photography assistant and lecturer at Kuwasawa Design School and Tokyo Zokei University, and around 1975 she began working as a freelance photographer.^*3 In 1976, she held her first solo exhibition, Hohoemi no Tejo, at the Shinjuku Nikon Salon. She married the photographer Shinzo Shimao in 1978, and their first daughter, Maho, was born that year.^*4 In early 1979, the family moved into a room in the former residence of Yukio Ozaki, which had been relocated to Gotokuji, Tokyo. Life in this old Western-style house provided the domestic setting that would later lead to My Husband and Refrigerator / ICE BOX.^*5 From the 1990s onward, she developed the long-term series BIBLIOTHECA / The Landscape of Books, photographing books and shelves, libraries, publishers, and conservation sites. In 2018, the series received the 37th Ken Domon Award, the Photographic Society of Japan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award.^*6 In 2022, torch press published My Husband, a photobook collecting family photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s. It received the Jury Special Mention at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards.^*7

Kuwasawa Design School and Kiyoji Otsuji

Ushioda’s photography is defined by her attention to objects in everyday settings as traces of someone’s use, touch, and time, instead of a pursuit of dramatic events. Her photographic education at Kuwasawa Design School and the environment around Kiyoji Otsuji, where people looked at photobooks and discussed photography, laid the foundation for this approach. Ushioda has recalled seeing Robert Frank’s The Americans for the first time at Otsuji’s home and studying it with students and graduates until they had nearly “worn holes in it.” She also bought photobooks by Paul Strand.^*3 These experiences show that she learned to consider photography through the sequence of a photobook, the composition of the frame, the surface of the subject, and the handling of light, as well as through the individual image. In relation to contemporary photographic movements, her senior at Kuwasawa, Yutaka Takanashi, participated in Provoke, while Ushioda said the movement “did not interest” her and that she watched it from a distance.^*3 A leaflet from Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino likewise argues that her early series To the Street cannot readily be placed within the konpora photography of photographers such as Takao Niikura and Shigeo Gocho. It describes her as an artist who was close to CAMERA WORKS and the independent-gallery movement while remaining outside them.^*8 Ushioda did not assimilate the coarse grain and forceful movement of Provoke or the delicate urban sensibility of konpora photography. Her work instead moved toward sustained, frontal observation of subjects within her immediate sphere of life.

Ushioda’s distance from the avant-garde photography of her time cannot be understood simply by assigning her retrospectively to a lineage. In Tokyo Zokei University research materials on Kiyoji Otsuji and Yutaka Takanashi, Ushioda recalls trying and failing to imitate photographs such as Takanashi’s Tokyoites. She came to understand that Takanashi worked from a prior conception and that “mood alone does not make a photograph.” Asked about PROVOKE, she called it a period when, for her, she had “stopped thinking”.^*30 Although she was personally close to people around PROVOKE, she did not inherit its methods. This distance clarifies how her work later departed from fleeting street scenes and moved toward the prolonged observation of household objects.

From Street Photography to Refrigerators

Ushioda had photographed people since she began studying photography at Kuwasawa. In the Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino leaflet, she recalls an assignment in Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s class that required students to go into the city, approach strangers, obtain their consent, and photograph them. She regularly went to Ginza, Ueno, Asakusa, and Shinjuku.^*8 In a Kuwasawa interview, she describes her first solo exhibition around 1976, Hohoemi no Tejo, as a show at the Nikon Salon prompted by the accumulation of her photographs of people. She had photographed figures in Shinjuku, at Asakusa sideshows, and in Ginza.^*3 The photographs from this period, later called To the Street, emerged from a process of approaching people on the street and photographing them with their permission. This method, however, soon reached an impasse. The Azamino leaflet records that as Ushioda became more adept, she began to wonder whether the camera was a weapon used to pursue prey.^*8 In an IMA interview, she also says that photographing people made her gaze feel increasingly oblique, as though she were looking at society and other people unkindly, and that Shimao urged her to respect human dignity.^*9 In a CCA conversation, she similarly explains that the more technically skilled she became, the more pointing a camera at someone felt like wielding a weapon, and she sensed the limits of her way of photographing others.^*10 Her transition to refrigerators began where these doubts about photographing people converged with life in the Gotokuji room. Ushioda told IMA that she tried photographing the house and its surroundings as freely as Shimao did, but felt she was merely imitating him. After stepping away from making work for a time, she looked for something she could do inside the home and began photographing the refrigerator with a 6×6 camera.^*9 A refrigerator has neither a face nor a human figure, yet someone uses it, fills it with food, opens and closes it, and organizes it according to the household’s needs. Her hesitation about pointing a camera at people did not turn her attention away from human lives; it directed her toward objects that retained the traces of those lives.

Refrigerator / ICE BOX—The Domestic Apparatus

Refrigerator / ICE BOX began when Ushioda photographed her own refrigerator. She then expanded the subject to various Tokyo households, recording domestic life through refrigerators from the 1980s to the mid-1990s.^*11 KYOTOGRAPHIE explains that she began photographing the refrigerator as a record of her own life, then spent roughly twenty years extending the project into different homes.^*12 A retrospective leaflet from Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino describes the origins of the project in detail: life in the former Yukio Ozaki residence in Gotokuji, a Swedish refrigerator obtained as surplus from the Occupation forces, and Ushioda’s desire to record the objects in the room.^*8 In the CCA conversation, she relates how Shimao brought home a large used refrigerator sold at a U.S. military base. Its noise and presence made her consider their life in the small room and prompted her to begin photographing her days.^*10 She also explains that she photographed refrigerators as though collecting insects: framing each one frontally, both open and closed, and leaving slippers and household goods around it undisturbed.^*10 Although a refrigerator has no face or gesture, it quietly holds evidence of food storage, purchasing habits, modes of organization, family structure, the seasons, and domestic labor. In Refrigerator / ICE BOX, the doors, contents of the shelves, and nearby household goods convey differences among homes without explaining the emotions of their inhabitants. The frontal viewpoint and repetition do not make the refrigerators appear to be anonymous industrial products. They reveal differences in how each household uses the same kind of object. Addressing comparisons with Bernd and Hilla Becher, the Azamino leaflet notes a shared use of a simple format and a predetermined subject, but characterizes Ushioda’s photographs as more than typologies: stories and social dimensions unfold beyond the objects.^*8 The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s placement of Refrigerator alongside work by Shigeo Gocho, Kazuo Kitai, and Shinzo Shimao in the “A Quiet Gaze, Time Fulfilled” section of TOP Collection: Serendipity likewise offers a way to understand the series as a quiet observation of domestic interiors.^*13

Photography for Refrigerator / ICE BOX began around 1978 and expanded from Ushioda’s own home to various other households, including those of acquaintances. The Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art describes the work as a series of “fixed-point observations” of her own and her acquaintances’ refrigerators. Differences in storage methods, containers, leftovers, and provisions disclose the life of each household more than the food itself does. Repeating the same subject made private domestic lives comparable.^*25

The photobook Refrigerator ICE BOX was published by Mitsumura Printing in 1996. The shashasha bibliography describes it as a 128-page bilingual Japanese-English publication. Its presentation of refrigerators photographed in different homes over a long period in a form that allows them to be compared sequentially within one volume is another important culmination of the series.^*26

KYOTOGRAPHIE materials from 2026 provide further detail on the origins of ICE BOX. The small Western-style room where Ushioda lived with her husband and daughter from 1978 to 1985 contained a large Swedish refrigerator that her husband had found at a U.S. military base. Ushioda repeatedly photographed this “polar bear”-like presence with a 6×6 camera mounted on a tripod.^*31 When the room, which they had continued to rent, was cleared in 2019, everyday photographs from the 1970s and 1980s were rediscovered. This discovery also prompted the contemporary reading of My Husband alongside ICE BOX. The refrigerator was more than a household appliance: it was an observation point where family members, friends, food, and scraps of paper gathered, preserving changes in their lives over an extended period.

BIBLIOTHECA / The Landscape of Books—The Materiality of Books

In BIBLIOTHECA / The Landscape of Books, begun in 1995, Ushioda shifted her subject from refrigerators to books. PGI’s exhibition text explains that she photographs books not simply as carriers of information but as entities that have passed through many hands and changed over time.^*14 A Nikon THE GALLERY exhibition text states that Ushioda was drawn less to the books’ contents than to the beauty of their construction and their presence as “objects”.^*6 Her notes for the Shiseido Gallery describe first editions, old books, damaged covers, conservation, gloves, and the experience of photographing in stacks, making tangible the book as an object that is handled, damaged, and protected, as well as read.^*15 In the Kuwasawa interview, Shimao explains that they use the text visible in the photographs to research authors, publication dates, approximate contents, page counts, and other details.^*3 The Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino leaflet quotes Ushioda recalling that Shimao’s suggestion that even insignificant objects have their own histories eased her hesitation about photographing things.^*8 Here, “story” is less an anecdote added by the photographer than a concrete span of time traceable through a photographed book’s author and publication date, its publisher, evidence of conservation, and the history of the stacks or editorial office around it. In The Former Misuzu Shobo Building, for example, she photographed the old wooden building used from 1948 to 1996, its stacks and editorial offices, an editorial meeting, and rooms left empty before its demolition. The leaflet also recounts Ushioda’s statement that finding Masao Maruyama’s Between the War and the Postwar seemingly forgotten on a bare shelf prompted her to begin photographing books.^*8 A book appears in the frame as a physical object encompassing the publisher’s building, editorial labor, postwar thought, conservation, and the movement of collections, as well as a medium whose contents can be read. BIBLIOTHECA is therefore both still-life photography and a record of spaces where knowledge is preserved, including libraries, publishing houses, private collections, conservation sites, and Kiyoji Otsuji’s studio. Bibliotheca [#01], held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is cataloged as a gelatin silver print made in 2007 and printed in 2018, locating the series within a museum collection as photographic art.^*16

My Husband—A Couple in the Same Domestic Space

My Husband comprises photographs of Ushioda’s husband, Shinzo Shimao, their daughter Maho, and their life in the Western-style house in Gotokuji.^*5 In the IMA interview, she explains that the photographs were not originally made for exhibition or publication. Old prints and negatives found while sorting belongings for a move led her to revisit them roughly forty years later.^*9 Shimao also photographed the same family life in work including Maho-chan. In the CCA conversation, Ushioda says that she had never considered publishing her own photographs because her husband already had a successful body of work made in the same room. The images ultimately assembled as My Husband, however, differed from his.^*10 In the Kuwasawa interview, she describes Shimao’s pictures as blurred, shaken, and softly contrasted but atmospheric in print, while she worked with a tripod and carefully focused the camera.^*3 Although both photographed the same room, family, and period, Shimao’s pictures derive their printed atmosphere from blur and camera movement, while Ushioda’s retain a strong sense of how domestic life was arranged through interior light, furniture, papers, dishes, the refrigerator, and cloth by the window.

As a photobook, My Husband is a two-volume set: Book 1 consists mainly of photographs made with a 6×6 camera, and Book 2 mainly of 35mm photographs.^*17 PGI describes Book 1 as a 122-page hardcover and Book 2 as a 76-page softcover, with texts by Yuri Mitsuda and Yurie Nagashima, design by Yuri Suyama, and text in Japanese and English.^*18 Aperture praised the two loosely banded volumes, the cloth binding of one book, Ushioda’s eye for details in the domestic setting, the duotone printing that reproduces the tonal range of the black-and-white photographs, and the essays by Mitsuda and Nagashima.^*7 The book’s place within international photobook culture rests on more than the quality of its design. In a Tokyo room in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ushioda—as wife, mother, and photographer—photographed her husband, young daughter, refrigerator, kitchen, bedding, scraps of paper, and visitors from the photography community. Edited forty years later, these images came to be read as a record of a particular era’s domestic life and a photographer’s point of view. In 2022, the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards selected 35 books from 1,026 submissions. My Husband was shortlisted for PhotoBook of the Year and received the Jury Special Mention.^*19 Aperture’s recognition of the two-volume structure, banded binding, duotone printing, and essays by Mitsuda and Nagashima reflects how photographs made at home became more than a retrospective album: they formed a photobook through which readers could consider Japanese life, marriage, child-rearing, and a woman photographer’s perspective in the late 1970s.^*7 Ushioda’s three major bodies of work are linked by the way familiar subjects at the time of exposure—refrigerators, books, and domestic photographs—were later assembled into photobooks and exhibitions and reread as records of domestic life, publishing culture, and relationships among photographers.

My Husband revisits photographs made from around 1978 in the domestic space Ushioda shared with Shinzo Shimao and their young daughter and brings them together in a 2022 photobook. The intervening decades made these family events both private records of their time and a domestic history reread from a later moment.^*27 Shimao photographed the same room and family, making the home a site of shared life seen by two photographers from different distances.^*28 Read alongside this domestic history, ICE BOX reveals how photographing a family directly and reading its life through the arrangement of objects emerged as two approaches to the same question of looking inside the home.^*29

Reassessing Tokuko Ushioda and the History of Women Photographers

Recognition of Ushioda’s work expanded considerably from the late 2010s through awards in Japan, photobooks, and international exhibitions. The receipt in 2018 of the Ken Domon Award, the Photographic Society of Japan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award for BIBLIOTHECA / The Landscape of Books showed that her long-term project on books had been recognized as a defining body of work extending beyond still life and documentary photography.^*6 The attention generated by My Husband also went beyond the rediscovery of family photographs. PGI explains that the work records Ushioda’s family life and growth as an artist, as well as a period when the Japanese photography world was developing through institutions such as Zeit-Foto Salon, Japan’s first commercial photography gallery.^*18 The same exhibition text notes that Ushioda photographed the younger selves of Shigeo Gocho, critic Osamu Hiraki, photography historian Ryuichi Kaneko, and others who would later help shape Japanese photography.^*18 FUJIFILM SQUARE’s English exhibition page likewise explains that the 2022 publication of photographs made roughly forty years earlier prompted their reassessment in Japan and abroad.^*5

When Ushioda made the photographs that became My Husband and Refrigerator / ICE BOX in the late 1970s, post-Provoke expression, konpora photography, I-Photography, commercial galleries, and photobooks were developing in parallel in Japan. Yet private realms such as the home, child-rearing, housework, and marriage—areas deeply connected to women’s lives—were seldom addressed in the central vocabulary of photographic history. Aperture’s I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now presents women photographers’ work as a counterpoint, complement, and challenge to established histories of Japanese photography, focusing on how women have viewed their own lives and Japanese society.^*20 Japan House São Paulo’s Life that unfolds places Ushioda in dialogue with Rinko Kawauchi. Kawauchi recognizes Ushioda as a photographer who has worked since a period when women had difficulty advancing in society and has engaged sincerely with life.^*21 Fotomuseum Den Haag also presents the exhibition as a corrective to Western attention centered on male Japanese photographers, identifying the observation of everyday life, women’s social position, and experimentation with photographic form as key concerns.^*22 Women photographers elsewhere were approaching the private sphere and images of women in different ways during the same period. Beginning in 1977, Cindy Sherman reenacted images of women circulating in film and the media in Untitled Film Stills; MoMA lists feminist art and photography among the terms associated with her work.^*23 From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Nan Goldin assembled photographs of friends, lovers, children, violence, and loss around her into slideshows and photobooks. MoMA describes The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as an intensely personal narrative drawn from the artist’s own experience.^*24 Ushioda’s photographs neither reenact images of women in Sherman’s manner nor present an intimate community as a diary in Goldin’s. Their distinctiveness lies in recording time spent inside the home as an accumulation of observations, through refrigerators, furniture, books, and interior details, without turning that time into confession. The international reception of My Husband therefore signifies more than praise for a well-made photobook. Through the photobook form, a Japanese home of the late 1970s and a woman photographer’s viewpoint became an entry into history available to readers around the world. In Refrigerator / ICE BOX, refrigerators photographed open and closed in the same format reveal each household’s food, dwelling, habits of organization, and ways of living. In BIBLIOTHECA / The Landscape of Books, publication dates, authors, conservation, stacks, former publishing-house buildings, and the provenance of collections become visual concerns alongside the books’ contents. In My Husband, private family photographs, presented through a two-volume publication, essays, and an international photobook award, also become documents of life and relationships within Japanese photography from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Ushioda cannot be contained within any single category of I-Photography, object photography, the photobook, or the archive. By photographing domestic objects over time, she preserved family, everyday life, publishing culture, and a woman photographer’s point of view in a form that later viewers can examine.