Miyako Yoshinaga
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • About
  • Artists
  • News
  • Exhibitions
  • Art Fairs
  • Events
  • Press
  • Viewing room
  • Video
  • Contact
Cart
0 items $
Checkout

Item added to cart

View cart & checkout
Continue shopping
Menu
The Legacy of Issei Suda (1940-2019): Human Memory
January 17 - February 27, 2020

The Legacy of Issei Suda (1940-2019): Human Memory

Past exhibition
  • Overview
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Press
  • Press release
  • Share
    • Facebook
    • X
    • Pinterest
    • Tumblr
    • Email
The Legacy of Issei Suda (1940-2019): Human Memory
View works

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA is honored to present The Legacy of ISSEI SUDA (1940-2019): Human Memory, the first posthumous exhibition in the United States of renowned Japanese photographer Issei Suda who passed away in early 2019. This is the gallery’s second exhibition of the artist, following the 2014 exhibition “Life in Flower: 1971-1979.” The exhibition is from January 17 to February 29, 2020.

 

Issei Suda (b. 1940 – d. 2019) began his long and celebrated career in 1967 as a stage photographer of avant-garde Japanese theatre. His travels through Japan during the early 1970s inspired much of his work at the time and concentrated on street scenes. He discovered the random beauty of textures and patterns in nature, and of ordinary people in their everyday habitat. Throughout his career, Suda demonstrated an innate ability to show people as latent participants existing in the highly charged space between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

 

This exhibition, in tribute to Suda’s legacy, features approximately 25 monochrome prints selected from his 1996 monograph entitled Human Memory which won the Ken Domon Award. In the postscript of the book, Suda describes his snapshots of strangers and everyday scenes as a strong reminder of himself, identifying within the gaze of his subjects a very personal connection. He also believes a photographic image, even its fragment, reflects on the human emotions that are woven into everything around us – people, materials, nature, and therefore can reinvigorate a ghost-like ambiguous memory, often disorienting time and place.

 

The works in the exhibition were taken from the late 1970s to the early 1990s in various Japanese towns and cities. The scenery is often drab and austere. The vulnerability and naivety the viewer might feel perhaps stem from the rapid economic and cultural changes in Japan at the time. Suda typically pares his capture down and eliminates anything unnecessary from his square frame so that the viewer is drawn to ruminate on the mysterious essence of the subject. The extraordinary aspects of the everyday reveal themselves through Suda’s unique worldview. He is able to capture a reality not often seen by the naked eye, that is created during the moment of capture by the photographer without “thinking.”

 

 

The work of Issei Suda has been shown since the 1970s in numerous museum exhibitions, including “A Self-Portrait,“ International Center of Photography, New York 1979; “Japanese Photography in the 1970s – Memories Frozen in Time,” Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo 1991; and “The History of Japanese Photography,“ Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 2003, Nagi no Hira- Fragments of Calm,” Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (2013). His works are in the collections of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago among many others.

 

For more information and image requests, please contact info@miyakoyoshinaga.com, + 1 212 268 7132.

Download Press Release

Related artist

  • Issei Suda

    Issei Suda

Back to exhibitions
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 Miyako Yoshinaga
Site by Artlogic
Go
Send an email
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences