The Met's First Japanese Photography Show in Three Decades

By Daniel Okafor

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will stage its first exhibition of Japanese photography in more than three decades. "A Long Shadow: Postwar Japan Through the Lens" runs until 2 May 2027 and gathers 15 intergenerational artists, more than 25 books and magazines, photographic prints, and a video installation.

The subject is blunt: how photographers across Japan and Okinawa documented the American military presence in the decades after the second world war. Curator Lisa Sutcliffe didn't start there. "Okinawa initially seemed like a compelling subject for an exhibition, bringing together questions of military occupation, sovereignty, rupture and identity," she said. "As my research developed, I expanded the scope to explore how photographers across Japan responded to and recorded the American military presence."

What anchors the show?

Tōmatsu Shōmei is the spine. The Met organized a Tōmatsu exhibition in 1992, and Sutcliffe's team has been buying with intent since. "We acquired a stunning print of this Tōmatsu Shōmei piece in 2023," she said of a work depicting a woman caught between blurred layers of chain-link fence at an American airbase in Okinawa.

Fences mattered to Tōmatsu. He described them as porous boundaries dividing rich and poor, past and present, east and west. "His perspective was always from the outside looking in," Sutcliffe noted. "For him, the perimeters of US military bases were particularly charged."

Whose stories get told?

The exhibition leans toward people official histories skip. Ishikawa Mao's "Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa" (1975–77) depicts women who worked as hostesses in bars frequented by Black American servicemen — intimate work, not reportage.

Heshiki Kenshichi's family supplied the American military with flak vests. His photograph "Seeing the Customer Off," from the series "Lungs of a Goat" (1970), records the ordinary routines of that factory work. "Rather than objectifying the women he photographed, Heshiki emphasizes their strength and agency," Sutcliffe said. "I find this image particularly evocative in the way it conveys the dignity, mystery and ritual of their work."

Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) contributes "Yokosuka Story #5" (1977) from her Yokosuka Story series. Iida Takao's 1970 book "Non Vol 2: Okinawa Wa Nigayo (Okinawa is a Bitter World)" appears among the printed matter.

Sutcliffe is explicit about the corrective: "Political and military histories often overlook the experiences of ordinary people whose lives are profoundly shaped by these events. These photographs offer the perspectives of artists, sex workers and islanders, revealing how the upheavals of the postwar period were experienced in everyday life, particularly by women whose stories are often left out of historical narratives."

Why photobooks and not just prints?

The show treats books and magazines as artworks, not containers. Sutcliffe credits the scholarship of Kaneko Ryuichi, Toda Masako and Ivan Vartanian for the shift: photobooks "have come to be recognized as works of art in their own right, and magazines are increasingly being studied as equally important sites of artistic experimentation." Museums, she said, now think beyond individual prints to how photographers "conceived, sequenced and circulated their work." Earlier exhibitions and publications have already expanded understanding of postwar Japanese photography, especially the experimental Provoke era (a radical late-1960s Japanese photo movement).

Does 1970 speak to 2026?

Sutcliffe thinks so, and says it plainly: "The moment when Japanese artists turned to photography and publishing to make sense of the tremendous changes taking place around them feels relevant to the social transformations unfolding across the globe today." She hopes visitors consider "the role of photography and art in shaping how history is constructed and remembered, and how its legacies continue to resonate in the present."

The span runs from Tōmatsu, responding to his own historical moment, to Yamashiro Chikako, still exploring its consequences more than 50 years later. One occupation, three generations of artists. That's the argument, and the walls will hold it until May 2027.