Miyako Ishiuchi and Mari Katayama Converse at ICP in New York

By Olivia Hart

Photographers Miyako Ishiuchi and Mari Katayama will speak at the International Center of Photography within its 2026–2027 Naomi Rosenblum ICP Talks Photographer Lecture Series, with both artists represented in the museum’s current exhibition.

The ICP listing says: “Join us at the International Center of Photography for a special conversation between photographers Miyako Ishiuchi and Katayama Mari, moderated by curator Pauline Vermare.” Vermare will lead the exchange, which will run both in person at ICP and online.

Both artists’ work appears in I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, the ICP exhibition that supplies their shared point of departure. Their conversation will range across their careers rather than treating the show as a single thematic brief.

What does the exhibition connect?

Running from the 1950s to now, the survey covers at least seven decades of image-making and printed matter. Photography sits beside installation, photobooks and other printed forms, following Japanese women’s experiences and perspectives through everyday life and the social roles they inhabited and reshaped.

ICP’s own description promises “delicate and blunt observations of everyday life” and practices that push photography’s boundaries. That is a useful tension: the show’s scale is historical, but its evidence remains stubbornly particular.

Aperture’s major 2024 companion publication expands the exhibition through essays, historical material and a comprehensive bibliography of photobooks made by Japanese women. The bibliography gives the publication a research function, not merely a showroom function. It treats photobooks as historical evidence rather than decorative appendices.

What do the two practices bring to the exchange?

The listing leads with an image by Ishiuchi from Yokosuka Story (1976–77), also reproduced in Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces (Aperture, 2026). Its caption reads: “© Ishiuchi Miyako. Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya.” The juxtaposition links a 1976–77 series with a 2026 book.

Ishiuchi is a Japanese photographer based in Gunma prefecture. Her awards include the Kimura Ihei Memorial Photographic Award in 1978 and the Hasselblad Award in 2014, while collections worldwide include her work.

Katayama is a multidisciplinary artist based in Gunma, Japan. Born in Saitama in 1987, she graduated with a master’s degree from the Department of Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2012.

Her practice begins with intricately hand-sewn fabric objects, which then appear in photography, video and activist-art projects. She also uses her body as a living sculpture, a mannequin and a lens through which to examine society and the environment.

The described process puts fabrication before image-making. Sewing supplies the material starting point; the body tests how that material can stand for social and environmental experience. Technique serves the work rather than becoming a decorative end in itself.

Why does Vermare’s institutional position matter?

Vermare is the Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum. She previously served as cultural director of Magnum Photos in New York and as a curator at ICP, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris.

That background gives the discussion unusual institutional range without turning it into a prestige roll call. ICP is hosting a conversation whose materials span a 1976–77 photographic series, sewn fabric, books and video.

The 2026–2027 Naomi Rosenblum ICP Talks Photographer Lecture Series receives generous support from the Rosenblum Family. The Japan Foundation, New York provides additional programme support, with further support for Ishiuchi supplied by the Marukawa Collection. Tickets and further details remain available through ICP.

The direction is unusually hands-on: an in-person and online exchange that brings the exhibition’s histories, books and installed practices into the same argument about what photography can hold.