A lecture on Japanese photographer Tokiwa Toyoko, and the implications of their work for our understanding of photography and gender in 1950s-60s Japan.
Extending out of the work on women photographers and artists in her recent book, Miryam Sas will discuss the work of photographer Tokiwa Toyoko in the 1950s-60s, who photographed the “akasen chitai” (red light districts) of Yokohama, and how her work complicates our understanding of “realism” and gender in “snapshot photography.”
Series convened by Olivier Krischer, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.
People
Miryam Sas
Miryam Sas is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). She began as a scholar of the experimental arts of the early twentieth century with a focus on modernist poetics and literary theory in Japan and France, reflected in her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, released in 2001). She has a strong interest in the cultural wave of the 1960s-1970s which she has explored through studies of theater, film, animation, dance, and intermedia art, for example in Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2010). Her new book on media theory and intermedia art in Japan, Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art, for which she was awarded a UC President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
