The labour of light: gender, technology and the domestic in the photography of Nagashima Yurie and Kawauchi Rinko

This article examines the photography of Nagashima Yurie and Kawauchi Rinko. Both of these Japanese women photographers produced considerable bodies of work during the Heisei era (1989–2019) attending to the familial and the domestic. We situate Nagashima’s photography as invested in a feminist politics of looking, and Kawauchi’s photography as exploring a cumulative gaze at the everyday through her poetics of looking. We argue that both Nagashima’s and Kawauchi’s distinct projects employ camera technology in their own personal realms to give significance to subjects, voices and objects that are often deemed insignificant. We also draw out the intersection of technology and gender through the reception of their work and examine how Nagashima and Kawauchi describe their own practice.