＃1 from "1906 to the skin" ＃1『1906 to the skin』より

Ishiuchi Miyako is a self-taught photographer. She established her reputation as a photographer with "Yokosuka Story"，a three-part work with the viewpoint of an "I" novel in which she captured memories of the city where she grew up in stained walls and advertizing signs. In 1990 she presented "1947", a series of close-ups of the feet and hands of women who, like herself, were born in the year "1947" and were then in their forties. This work caught the attention of the contemporary art world. The photographs collected under the title "1906" were photographed between 1991 and 1993. They were presented in a one-person exhibition in 1994 and published simultaneously in book form as "1906 to the skin". The work in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo is a new version in a different size, made especially for "Surface Exposed: Photography in the Art of the Nineties," an exhibition organized by the museum in 1997. The subject, which has the appearance of wind-formed ripples in sand, the bark of an ancient tree, or the wall of an old house, is the skin of Butoh dancer Ono Kazuo, who was born in 1906. Ishiuchi initially intended to photograph Ono's hands and feet, but when the elderly dancer began a spontaneous dance, she became fascinated by the texture of his skin as it appeared in natural light. Photographed with a microscopic lens, the deeply wrinkled surface contains memories of rigorous, repetitive training and the time accumulated in the dancer's body.