Maybe it’s just because it’s our first meeting, but Ishiuchi Miyako frequently deflects from herself when she speaks. She relishes asserting, several times over the course of the afternoon we spend together at her home in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, about two hours by express train north and inland from Tokyo, that she’s not really a photographer. Yet she’s been one of Japan’s foremost photographers practically from the moment she first picked up a camera, after receiving some equipment from a friend, in the mid-1970s. Ishiuchi insists that she doesn’t take many photographs and that, when she does, she never fusses over composition. And she demurs that she’s no writer, despite being a powerful storyteller whose 1993 book, , a collection of reflections on photography, reads like a postmodern fiction in which the elements of her work—individual dots of black ink, a trio of vintage enlargers—function as characters in their own right, appearing as objects of desire, attachment, and relinquishment. Even Ishiuchi’s name is an invention of a sort: at a certain point, she took her mother’s full
