The Cameraman in a Skirt: The Crisis over Female Photographers in Postwar Japan

In postwar Japan the media seized upon the image of women suddenly appearing around Japan with cameras in their hands. In August of 1952, the pictorial paper Asahi Graph addressed this “women’s photography boom” through a two-page spread titled “The Female Photographer Notification Board” which introduced women who were making a living through their camerawork to its audiences. The accompanying introduction text painted a picture of women only engaged with photography in relationship to men: before the war their main connection to photography was as assistants to their husbands in the studio and after the war the camera became another means to meet men and marry. In this paper I critically examine the widespread (though currently ignored) media attention around the so-called birth of the female photographer in the postwar which either depicted her as a dilettante using the leisure practice of photography as a means to marriage or as a masculine figure insubordinate to social norms.

From popularly published books to advice columns on how to succeed as a photographer I re-read the vast archive of photography magazines and weekly newspapers for their representations of female relationships with photography. Like the “modern girl” of the 1920s and 1903s, I see the female photographer as part media construction that many female photographers pushed back against in interviews and personal accounts of their work. To bring to light the women who photographed, their relationships with optical technologies, and evaluate their distinct contributions in relation to constructions of otherness, this paper looks beyond the canon to consider how materials from this alternative archive expose the values that constructed a narrative about why women were in front of or behind the lens of a camera.