shashasha

From Yokosuka marks the final episode in Hasselblad Award laureate Miyako Ishiuchi’s Yokosuka series. Having spent her childhood and adolescence in Yokosuka, the small harbor city has always had a special meaning to Ishiuchi. It is Yokosuka - host to one of the biggest US naval bases in Japan - which became the topic of her first published work, when in 1976 she returned to deal with her experiences in the town by way of a photography.

"I don’t think of Yokosuka as my hometown and I have few sweet and joyous memories there. It was natural because Yokosuka, a town of the American naval base, was not comfortable to me as a young girl who had newly moved at the time of entering elementary school, to this new place where my father had been working away from our home in the countryside."
"I started my career as a photographer by photographing Yokosuka. The vivid contrast of light and shadow inherent in the town somehow created photogenic landscapes as the history of the town seemed to be making invisible scars everyday."

— from the artist’s foreword