Innocence

INNOCENCE is a unique book of photographs, portraits of sorts that Miyako Ishiuchi took of scars on women's bodies. We never see the faces of her subjects, only the marks which remain on their bodies. These black-and-white photos have been processed to make the contrast quite neutral, leaving little difference between the subject's skin, which is lit only by natural light. For Ishiuchi, these scarred bodies represent a kind of purity. In a text which accompanies the book, and has been translated into English, Ishiuchi states: "just as self, individuality and the like when piled on the plate of time seem silly and inconsequential, so youth and age, beauty and ugliness on the surface of the body are pretty much just two sides of the same coin." INNOCENCE" is a carefully considered study of the female body, from a perspective which is not often represented.-Publisher's website. Ishiuchi, became the first Asian female photographer to win the Hasselblad Foundation Award, in 2014. The Foundation citation notes: "Ishiuchi's work is extremely coherent and developing in a determined and distinctive way; using the camera and all of its aesthetic potential to investigate the intersection of the political and the personal aspects of memory Ishiuchi has been both a pioneer and a role model for younger artists, not least as a woman working in the male-dominated field of Japanese photography,"