石内 都, Ishiuchi Miyako; born March 27, 1947, is a Japanese photographer whose work explores memory, trauma, the body, and the passage of time. She represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2014. Her photographs are held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ishiuchi was born in Gunma Prefecture and raised in Yokosuka, a port city dominated by a large U.S. naval base. She briefly studied textile dyeing and weaving at Tama Art University before leaving in her second year. Yokosuka, marked by the lingering presence of war and occupation, became a formative environment for her artistic vision; she has described the city as the starting point of her photography.

She began working as a photographer in the 1970s, alongside a generation that included Daidō Moriyama and Shōmei Tōmatsu, who were redefining Japanese photography in the postwar period. Her first major body of work, Yokosuka Stories (1976–1977), documents the city of her youth. Around the same time, she organized Hyakka Ryōran, an exhibition of women photographers. In 1979, she won the Kimura Ihei Award for her book and exhibition APARTMENT.

Ishiuchi’s early work is characterized by coarse grain, high contrast, and a raw visual language often associated with the are-bure (rough, blurry) aesthetic. From the 1990s onward, her focus shifted toward intimate close-ups of aging bodies and personal objects, exploring skin, fabric, and material traces as carriers of memory. In Hiroshima (2008), she photographed the clothing of victims of the atomic bombing, while Frida: Love and Pain (2012) presents images of Frida Kahlo’s personal belongings, photographed at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City.

Across her career, Ishiuchi has developed a deeply personal and physical approach to photography, using objects and surfaces as witnesses to lived experience, loss, and time.

Reference

Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), English edition.
Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyako_Ishiuchi