Ishiuchi Miyako, a photographer identified with the Provoke movement in Japan, returned to her childhood home in the mid-1970s and made a large group of black-and-white photographs. As a young woman she explored the city of Yokosuka, which was occupied by U.S. forces after the Japanese surrender in 1945, two years before her birth.

She made three series between 1978 and 1981: Apartments, which are portraits of dilapidated buildings, inside and out, but not of their inhabitants; Yokosuka Story, which documents Miyako's wanderings along the coastline and the city's public spaces; Endless Nights, which looks into the popular "love hotels," now abandoned, where empty beds and overflowing ashtrays echo the intimacies that once unfolded there.

Three images from Sweet Home Yokosuka by Ishiuchi Miyako. Copyright the artist, courtesy Andrew Roth Gallery.

People rarely turn up within the frame of her photographs; when they do, they are more often children than adults, which confers a distanced sense of longing on these grainy, high-contrast images. In many of the interior scenes, abandoned personal belongings, such as shoes or slippers, trigger a kind of childhood wonder about the lives that adults who lived here must have had. Although the U.S. military exerted a considerable force on the city when Ishiuchi was a child, its presence is largely limited to references that can only be read in signs written in Japanese that are rarely translated into English, as in the small print of a bar in the Yokosuka Story grouping (above right).

"What is most compelling about this work," writes Andrew Roth in the accompanying description, "is not necessarily what Ishiuchi photographed or the seductive rendition of reality into black and white, but rather how she conceptualized the act of picture-taking. Ishiuchi was less interested in finding her unique vision, more comfortable 'usig' the medium as a means to confronting herself and her past. This methodology was reinforced by the ideas discussed among her peers from the Provoke movement, Moriyama, Takanashi and Taki Koji, who questioned whether the photographic medium was capable of capturing any version of empirical truth."

Camera truth and emotional content are hugely present in these photographs - which give them a refreshing sense of urgency that is largely absent from post-Modern picture-making.

In conjunction with the exhibition PPP Editions has published Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980, printing over 200 photographs in tri-tone, with a bilingual essay by the contemporary Japanese writer and filmmaker Nishikawa Miwa, which is available at the gallery.

Ishiuchi Miyako: Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980 continues through June 25^th. Andrew Roth Gallery, 160A East 70^th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, New York, NY. 212.717.9067. Hours: Tuesday-Friday, noon to 5 pm.

052710