‘Ravens and Red Lipstick’ Tells the Story of Japanese Photography

Ravens and Red Lipstick, a new book by a British art curator, offers a rare look at Japanese photography from 1945 onwards. In this 288-page book, Lena Fritsch deconstructs the stereotypes and other interpretative frameworks that Western criticism and research tend to apply to Japanese artistic production.

Taking a chronological approach, she studies the key periods of recent history one by one, from post-war realism to the more introspective and ‘pop’ photography of the last two decades, like the photo of lipstick by Ishiuchi Miyako, entitled Mother’s #38, from 2002, which inspired the title of the book, and also the work of Mika Ninagawa.

In each chapter, the photos featured in the book are accompanied by an interview with an artist and various explanations, notably concerning the socioeconomic context of the shot.

This exhaustive introduction to contemporary Japanese photography, in all its diversity and subtlety, comes from an expert eye. Lena Fritsch, who works at the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford, specialised in the study of art and Japanese photography of the 20th and 21st century.