Yoshino Oishi

Yoshino Oishi was born in Tokyo in 1944 and graduated from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art. Art Platform Japan records her birth date as May 28, 1944, and her birthplace as Tokyo.^*21 Her student years coincided with the Vietnam War. The distance between having been born in a country that had waged war and having no firsthand memory of war herself remained at the root of her later reporting.

Canon’s profile records that a visit to Vietnam during her student years made a strong impression on Oishi and that, after graduation, she became a documentary photographer who traveled independently to report from different regions. ^*3 In an interview with Sarai, Oishi explains that she goes to places of war because she wants to know, and that the camera is the means through which she can pass on what she has learned. ^*4 For Oishi, photography became a way to listen first, then show readers elsewhere how a person is living in the present after the experiences they have described.

“Can I Remain Unaware?”: A Postwar Generation’s Starting Point

Oishi’s attention to life after war comes from her concern with injuries that persist after the news declares an event over. An interview in the quarterly Michi summarizes her position with the phrase “the war is not over”: once she has learned about the present lives of people harmed by war, she feels compelled to communicate what she has learned. ^*5 Publication materials for Senka no Kioku likewise move across Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sudan, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa through the continuing time of war’s aftereffects. ^*6

Listening before Photographing: The Camera as an Entry into Conversation

Oishi’s portraits grow from direct conversation with people whose wartime experiences she has not witnessed herself. She has said that she asks where they were and what they were doing during the war, explains why she wants to photograph them, and only then raises the camera. ^*4 This makes captions and testimony as important to the photobook as facial expression. The photographed person supplies the memory; the photograph holds the person who carries it in the present.

Later assessments also describe this sequence of listening before photographing as a condition of Oishi’s images. Rikkyo University characterizes her photographs of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, and the Tokyo air raids as the “result of dialogue” with the people she photographed.^*22 The photograph takes responsibility for the present expression that remains after that dialogue, while the testimony preserves what the face alone cannot state. The two are therefore difficult to separate.

Vietnam Rin to: Twenty Years of Looking at a War That Did Not End

Oishi returned repeatedly to Vietnam beginning in 1981, photographing people affected by Agent Orange, war orphans, women who had lost family members, and others living in postwar society. Vietnam Rin to received the 20th Domon Ken Award in 2001; Mainichi’s list of past recipients confirms the award and its edition. ^*7 The National Art Center, Tokyo’s Art Commons record describes the work as a twenty-year documentary, begun in 1981, on ordinary people. ^*8

Mukoku no Tami and Yoru to Kiri wa Ima: Aftereffects across Regions

Mukoku no Tami photographs people in different parts of Asia, while Yoru to Kiri wa Ima turns to survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Across both projects, Oishi returns from the generic category of “victim” to particular faces, names, and lives. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Monk, made in 1981, belongs to Mukoku no Tami. ^*9 Baby, from the same series, dates to 1979. ^*10 Carolina, also in the museum’s collection, belongs to Yoru to Kiri wa Ima and was made in 1988 as a portrait of a survivor. ^*11

Photographing Hiroshima and Nagasaki Away from the Day of the Bombing

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oishi concentrates on people and places carrying the experience of the atomic bombings decades later. Her approach leaves reconstruction of August 1945 aside in favor of present-day lives and surviving traces. Fujiwara Shoten’s author biography lists the 1995 photobook HIROSHIMA: Hanseiki no Shozo among her major publications.^*12 Canon’s exhibition on Nagasaki combined the words and faces of people who had been children or young adults at the time of the bombing with photographs of surviving sites, presenting memory seventy-four years later.^*13

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s 2019 exhibition Senka no Kioku presented roughly forty years of Oishi’s work in three groups: the Mekong region, ethnic and religious conflicts, and the lingering traces of the Asia-Pacific War.^*14 Crevis’s photobook of the same name contains 160 photographs and edits multiple regions through the shared duration of life after war.^*6

Color and black-and-white vary across Oishi’s work rather than forming one fixed stylistic signature. Early projects in Papua and Mukoku no Tami include both, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s collection records a color photograph from 1979. ^*1 She used the two according to place and publication medium while keeping present-day facial expression and living environment at the center of the image. Senka no Kioku, by contrast, edits 160 black-and-white photographs from across a long career, allowing differences of region and decade to be compared along one temporal axis. ^*6 The book keeps wars with different political causes distinct by preserving testimony and portraits region by region, while its sequence allows injuries that persist after formal endings to be compared.

Photograph, Testimony, and Caption: Bringing Time before and after the Shutter into the Work

Photography critic Kotaro Iizawa has described Oishi’s method as bringing the time “before and after” the shutter release into the photograph.^*27 Her repeated photographs of Viet and Duc from 1982 to 2009 accumulate time outside the portrait itself: listening before the photograph, a life that continues after it, and changes visible on later visits. As Iizawa also notes, captions are crucial. Their text becomes another layer of record, linking a past that cannot appear in the frame to the expression photographed in the present.

Oishi usually photographs years after the combat itself, in places where people who experienced it continue to live. Because the camera cannot photograph a past event directly, listening before the portrait and words within the photobook become parts of the work. Oishi’s repeated emphasis in the Sarai interview on “listening before photographing” belongs to this method.^*4 The twenty-year duration of Vietnam Rin to is tied to the same problem: one portrait cannot show the full time of an aftermath.^*8 By returning to the same places and photographing people she has met before, the series accumulates both locations where wounds remain and locations where life has changed. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well, she photographs the aged faces and words of hibakusha and the surviving traces of the cities in the present, rather than repeating images from the day of the bombings.^*13 Repeated visits and captions bridge the distance between the present expression a photograph can hold and the past that testimony must tell.

Speaking at Sophia University on human security and peacebuilding, Oishi argued that psychological wounds from war do not necessarily disappear with time and can intensify years later as recurring nightmares. She cited Agent Orange in Vietnam, unexploded ordnance in Laos, and memories of mass killing in Cambodia.^*24 This understanding makes it necessary for her work to return to people ten and twenty years later instead of restricting photography to the period immediately after an event. The National Diet Library’s record for her photobook Senso wa Owatte mo Owaranai describes it as a work drawn from forty years of photography and focused on the wounds left by Japan’s wars.^*25

Comparing Yoshito Matsushige, Ken Domon, and Hiromi Tsuchida: Positions on Photographing the Aftermath

Before Oishi, Japanese photography already included major works concerned with people living through and after war, not just images of combat or explosion. Yoshito Matsushige photographed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Faced with the injured, he was unable to release the shutter for more than thirty minutes, yet he ultimately made five photographs. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum describes those images as “witnesses to history” from the day of the atomic bombing. ^*18 For Matsushige, firsthand presence at the event and the ethical difficulty of photographing became conditions of the record itself.

Oishi’s own starting point also predates her work on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her documentary photography had already entered people’s daily lives in places such as New Guinea. Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts included New Guinea: Mother and Child in a Taro Field (1973) in an exhibition section on postwar Japanese photography, alongside works by Daido Moriyama, Mitsuaki Iwago, and others.^*26 Before she concentrated on the aftereffects of war, her work was therefore grounded in documentary encounters that placed people in relation to the environments in which they lived.

Ken Domon’s 1958 photobook Hiroshima grew from work made in the city in 1957 and addressed the long-term consequences of the atomic bombing through photographs of hibakusha, hospitals, orphanages, and people unable to pay for medical treatment. ^*19 Oishi cannot therefore be credited with first turning Japanese photography toward war’s aftereffects. Beginning in the 1970s, Hiromi Tsuchida also photographed hibakusha, the city, and surviving objects systematically in Hiroshima 1945–1979; the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum holds his 1976 portrait of manga artist Keiji Nakazawa, among other works. ^*20

Oishi’s distinct position lies in repeatedly crossing among different wars and regions—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, and the Holocaust—through the shared problem of time lived after war. When she has not witnessed the fighting herself, photography alone cannot establish the past event. Listening before photographing, returning later, and incorporating captions and testimony therefore become parts of the work. Matsushige witnessed Hiroshima on the day of the bombing; Domon photographed the lives of hibakusha in the 1950s; Tsuchida systematized survivors, the city, and objects. Oishi instead returned again and again to Vietnam, Cambodia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, and elsewhere, accumulating testimony and present-day portraits of survivors through one long-term documentary method.

An international comparison can be made with W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith’s Minamata project. The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto describes W. Eugene Smith as a leading figure in the LIFE photo essay and identifies the period beginning in 1971, when the Smiths lived in Minamata and documented pollution and its victims over time, as a major phase of his work.^*2 The Smiths lived within one affected community and communicated the continuing damage through photographs and text. Oishi moved repeatedly among Vietnam, Cambodia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Holocaust sites, and other regions, following the persistence of “after war” through the testimony of individual survivors.

The Tension between Humanism and Testimonial Photography

Oishi’s photographs often emphasize the dignity of people who have been harmed. That humanist emphasis carries a risk: if suffering is resolved into an image of people who live with composure and dignity, the political causes and specific histories of violence can recede. Oishi’s answer has been to listen to the people she photographs, return to their places, and sustain relationships over time. Canon’s materials for a 2008 exhibition show that, alongside her work around the world, she also photographed regional traditions in Japan, including Kurokawa Noh, over long periods. ^*3 The Japan Professional Photographers Society’s record of her honorary membership confirms her long institutional position across both photojournalism and photographic culture. ^*15

Oishi herself also situates this work within the history of photojournalism. A profile published by the Japan Professional Photographers Society lists her current research interests as “changes and trends in photojournalism” and “people in war and peace as seen through photojournalism”.^*23 Her long-term reporting is therefore also a method for photographing aftereffects and everyday life that fall out of a news cycle structured to move to the next event after combat or ceasefire.

Oishi’s long projects operate on a time scale different from news organized around the conclusion of an event. Crevis’s exhibition introduction stresses that she followed victims of war for roughly forty years and directed her lens toward memories held by people whose voices often went unheard.^*16 Nagoya City Library’s bibliographic record for Senka no Kioku likewise describes the book of 160 black-and-white photographs as a collection on victims of war.^*17 Instead of asking one decisive photograph to stand for a war, she met some people repeatedly and joined their testimony to their present bodies, making the passage toward forgetting itself part of what the record must address.