Recent Acquisitions: Miyako Ishiuchi and Cristina García Rodero
Twelve gelatin silver prints from Ishiuchi’s series 1·9·4·7 (1988) were acquired. This series consists of close-up images of the hands and feet of women born in the same year as Ishiuchi, 1947. It marks an important turning-point in Ishiuchi’s career, signaling her shift from street photography to images of the human body. Announcing the award of the 2014 Hasselblad Award to Miyako Ishiuchi, the Hasselblad Foundation commented:
"During a period of 35 years, Miyako Ishiuchi has established an international career which is both impressive and highly significant. Her strength of character and uncompromising vision have resulted in some of the most powerful as well as personal representations of postwar Japan. Ishiuchi's work is extremely coherent and has developed in a determined and distinctive way; using the camera and all of its aesthetic potential to investigate the intersection of the political and the personal aspects of memory, Ishiuchi has been both a pioneer and a role model for younger artists, not least as a woman working in the male-dominated field of Japanese photography. She has continued to innovate, explore and agitate throughout her career, both in terms of ideas and her style and approach."
Cristina García Rodero's gelatin silver print Procession, Holy Saturday, Canosa di Puglia, Italy (2000) is part of her long-running exploration of rituals and festivals in the Mediterranean region. Born in 1944 in Spain, García Rodero studied painting at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Madrid before taking up photography. For almost two decades she dedicated her time to researching and photographing popular and traditional festivities, principally in Spain but also across Mediterranean Europe. This project culminated in her book España Oculta, published in 1989, which won the Book of the Year Award at the Arles Festival of Photography. The same year, García Rodero also won the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Foundation Prize. In 1993, the Getty Center in Los Angeles acquired more than 6000 of her photographs of Mediterranean religious rites and popular festivals, praising her work as a resource for both anthropologists and art historians.