Looking Further At A Photographer I Found In My Book Research

Miyako Ishiuchi

"Miyako Ishiuchi represented Japan at the 2005 Venice Biennale and since the 1970s has been one of Japan’s preeminent photographers, creating a number of provocative bodies of works dealing with identity, memory and death. Scars for Ishiuchi are mementos of life experiences, intimate trinkets of sorrow that are normally only revealed in the most private of circumstances.

The subjects in 'Scars' are decapitated and the torsos and body parts suggest nothing of the subject’s identity. Each wonderfully printed plate is titled by the cause of the scar and beyond accident, cancer and war, we know nothing of the pain or narrative that lies behind each image.

Ishiuchi’s striking and powerfully unsentimental eye transcends what is normally denied, concealed and disguised, into objects of intriguing beauty.

'I cannot stop (taking photographs of scars) because they are so much like a photograph. They are visible events, recorded in the past. Both the scars and the photographs are the manifestation of sorrow for the many things which cannot be retrieved and for love of life as a remembered present.' -Miyako Ishiuchi"

http://www.claxtonprojects.com/books/miyako-ishiuchi/