Tokuko Ushioda Photo Exhibition: My Husband

About the exhibition

The negatives and prints show everyday moments with Ushioda's husband and young daughter — images the photographer herself had forgotten for 40 years. Found by chance while she was sorting belongings during a move, the decades-old photographs were published in 2022 as the photobook My Husband (torch press). The book earned Ushioda wider recognition overseas as well as in Japan, and sparked a reappraisal of her work. This exhibition presents approximately 30 photographs from the series.

Tokuko Ushioda first encountered photography at Kuwasawa Design School, where she enrolled in 1960. She studied under Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Kiyoji Otsuji and began working as a freelance photographer around 1975. In 1978, she married fellow photographer Shinzo Shimao, and in early 1979, shortly after the birth of their eldest daughter, Maho, the family began living in a Western-style house in Gotokuji that was the relocated former residence of Yukio Ozaki, a statesman with a pivotal role in Japan's adoption of constitutional politics. Their home was a single room of about 15 tatami mats located midway along the second floor of the old building, said to have been constructed in 1888. With no bath and a shared kitchen on the first floor, Ushioda managed the many demands of daily life while quietly continuing to capture the everyday scenes around her.

Her husband and daughter appear alongside the things that filled their daily lives — dishes, curtains, and other household items — as well as scenes the family must have seen. Although My Husband is suffused with a slightly unreal, almost fairytale atmosphere, it also evokes a strange sense of déjà vu, as if the viewer had once visited the house. Taken with no thought of publication and buried in the back of the photographer's memory for many years, these images point to an essential aspect of photography itself. Even as a documentary medium, photography can straightforwardly reflect the photographer's unconscious feelings, and this fortunate rediscovery highlights this unique quality.