Photographing ‘HUMANITY’: KYOTOGRAPHIE 2025 (Part 1)

The 13th edition of KYOTOGRAPHIE, Kyoto’s internationally acclaimed photography festival, unfolded across various venues in the city earlier this spring. Running until May 11, the festival centered around the theme of HUMANITY, drawing visitors into compelling explorations of identity, history, and lived experience. Below, we revisit a selection of standout exhibitions from this year’s edition.

A Monochrome Mirage of Color: Graciela Iturbide

Presented by DIOR at the Former Kyoto City Museum Annex, Graciela Iturbide, the renowned Mexican photographer, shares her 60-year exploration of her homeland’s landscapes and peoples—desert communities, Zapotec women, and mushe (men in cross‑dressing roles). Though Mexico is famed for its blazing color, Iturbide reveals: ‘Color is illusion to me; I see reality in black and white.’

Her work exposes compelling contrasts—desert-dwelling women, their faces painted to dissolve into radiant light, and scenes brimming with plant life and weathered architecture. The exhibit’s staged sets, made from washi paper, frame early and recent works alike, spotlighting the photographer’s consistent vision.

Love for Okinawa, and for Humanity: ‘Mao Ishikawa – Akabana’

Photographer Mao Ishikawa, born under U.S. military rule in Okinawa, made her bold debut in 1982 with Hot Days in Camp Hansen, a series documenting Black American soldiers stationed on the island. Beginning in 1975, she took a job at a bar in Koza frequented by those soldiers, using the opportunity to capture their lives through her lens.

Her approach was free of disdain or distance—she engaged her subjects not as others, but as fellow human beings. Ishikawa’s perspective focused less on the differences between Okinawan residents and U.S. troops, and more on the shared dignity of human life.

Her exhibition Akabana, presented by SIGMA at Kondaya Genbei’s Chikuin-no-ma, was structured in two parts: at the entrance, her early series Akabana (1975–77); at the back, new works from The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll, taken in 2023 on Yonaguni and Ishigaki Islands.

The exhibition shed light on Ishikawa’s dual stance: a fierce gaze of resistance toward oppressive systems, and a tender gaze of love toward the individuals within them.

Recasting India’s Myths: ‘Dressing Up – Pushpamala N’

Since the mid-1990s, Indian artist Pushpamala N has used photo-performance and staged photography to create satirical, often subversive narratives—playing every role herself: actress, director, producer, and set designer. Her work critiques the construction of female identity and nationhood, earning her the reputation of ‘contemporary Indian art’s most entertaining iconoclast.’

Her exhibition Dressing Up – Pushpamala N, presented by CHANEL Nexus Hall and held at the Annex of the Museum of Kyoto, brought together works inspired by Indian epics such as the Ramayana.

The highlight was The Arrival of Vasco da Gama, a reinterpretation of an 1898 painting by José Veloso Salgado. The work dramatized the explorer’s historic encounter with the Zamorin of Calicut, recontextualized through a postcolonial lens. Accompanying the photographs were original sets and props used in the shoot, offering insight into her process and inviting viewers to imagine the unseen layers behind the image.

The Politics of Absence: Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop

At Shimadai Gallery, the exhibition Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop (supported by agnès b.) brought together a collaborative, project-based series by two photographers from vastly different backgrounds.

Lee Shulman, an award-winning filmmaker and artist known for his work in advertising and music, began collecting vintage photographic slides in 2017—buying them by the box, without curation. These were mostly anonymous family snapshots and group portraits taken in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawn to their quiet charm, Shulman saw them as intimate windows into mid-century life.

But one detail kept catching his eye: many of the images shared a peculiar absence—an empty chair or a gap in the frame, as if someone had just stood up to take the photo. Given the era, marked by segregation and the civil rights movement, these empty spaces began to take on deeper meaning.

In this collaborative series, Shulman and Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop subtly inserted the figure of a Black man into those spaces—someone who, historically, would have been excluded from such idyllic family scenes. In doing so, the duo offered a quiet yet pointed critique of racial and class-based exclusion, challenging sanitized visions of American prosperity.

Their method, both clever and poignant, revealed the creative potential of reimagining the past through photography. Against the backdrop of postwar affluence, the works made space for the unseen and the erased—opening the door to new, more inclusive narratives. The result was a moving reminder of photography’s power not just to document history, but to reframe it.