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Yoshio Mizoguchi’s portraits of girls and women of all ages in Japan, taken between the early 1990s and the early 2000s.
“At some point in my life, I had come to think of women as being comparable to fireflies,” writes Yoshio Mizoguchi in the afterword of his photobook “Hotaru” (“Fireflies”). His photographs show girls playing on the beach, older women in kimonos during a shopping trip, a woman provocatively raising her leg, another showing only her face, her body hidden behind a tree; together, they weave a complex if incomplete image of the many lives women lead in Japan.
“When the sweet nectar of my youth was gone, I took a camera as my new firefly scoop and decided I would capture new fireflies. It is 35 years now since I began shooting fireflies. I hoped to convey that passion and the subtle sensuality that women possess.”