Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Ishiuchi Miyako.

This special episode of Photography Down The Line is a recording of a conversation between Ben Harman and the photographer Ishiuchi Miyako at a public event held at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh on 2nd August 2022. The event marked the launch of Miyako's solo exhibition at Stills, the first ever display of her work in Scotland. Miyako responded to questions with the assistance of an interpreter, the filmmaker Linda Hoaglund. 

Ishiuchi Miyako was born in 1947 and first started taking photographs, self-taught, in the mid-1970s. In 2005, with her series Mother's, she represented Japan at the prestigious Venice Biennale in Italy. Her work has been exhibited and collected by numerous collections and institutions around the world. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2015) and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan (2017). Miyako was the recipient of the 2014 Hasselblad Award.

Linda Hoaglund is a bilingual filmmaker born and raised in Japan, where she attended Japanese public schools. A graduate of Yale University, she has directed and produced five films about art and the relationship between Japan and the U.S. including Things Left Behind, a film about the transformative power of Ishiuchi Miyako’s “hiroshima” photographs. Linda’s most recent film, Edo Avant Garde, reveals how Japanese artists innovated many techniques of “modern art” in the 17th and 18th century.