# Girly photo (onnanoko shashin)

> Young Japanese women photograph their own lives on 35 mm film, often with a cheap autofocus compact held at arm's length, sometimes with a tripod and self-timer: themselves, friends, boyfriends and family, their rooms, clothes, half-eaten food, cats, flowers and the evening sky. Lit by the built-in flash or plain daylight, the pictures come out in bright, often saturated colour in photobooks and magazines. Self-portraits, snapped or staged as parody, face the camera on the sitter's own terms.

- Period: 1993–2001
- Where it began: Tokyo in the 1990s
- Kind: Street & snapshot
- Also called: Onna no ko shashin, Girls' photography, Girly photo, Gārī foto
- Page: https://lumogeny.com/styles/onnanoko-shashin/

## How the look is made

- Photograph your own life and keep at it like a diary: yourself, your friends and family, your room, what you ate and what you wore.
- Use a small 35 mm camera, often an autofocus compact, and stay within a few steps; for self-portraits set it on a tripod with the self-timer or hold it out at arm's length or into a mirror; let daylight or the built-in flash do the lighting.
- Turn the camera on yourself and face it head-on, laughing, winking or pulling a face; stage some self-portraits as parody, dressed up as a schoolgirl, a dancer or a comic-book heroine, or mimicking the look of commercial nude pictures to turn them back on the viewer.
- Let colour carry the mood: a pink T-shirt, a red flower, a peach-coloured dusk sky over power lines, printed bright from colour negative.
- Keep the snapshot's speed and flaws, the off-centre or tilted frame and the blurred face, and do not retouch.
- Sequence portraits with skies, food and objects into a photobook or zine rather than single showpieces.

## How it is lit

- The compact's built-in flash at close range, indoors and at night among friends: faces lit flat and bright, hard shadows on the wall behind, dark backgrounds.
- Daylight outdoors or against a pale wall indoors: low sun on a concrete ledge, an even sky over an empty swimming pool.
- Shooting into the dusk sky or into lights at night, letting buildings and wires go to silhouette and the lens flare.

### A light plan from its choices (schematic)

- Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

## Camera settings

24–50 mm · f/3.5–f/16 · 1/500–1/30 s · ISO 100–400 (on full-frame), documented. Film speeds and the flash and daylight shutter range are inferred.

## Directing people

Two modes. Snapshots of friends sitting loosely on floors, steps and ledges, laughing, holding drinks or busy with make-up, glancing back at the friend with the camera. Self-portraits at arm's length or by self-timer, square-on, eyes straight into the lens, laughing, winking or pulling a face, on the sitter's own terms, not posed to please.

## Styling

Their own clothes, as worn that day or put together to be seen: T-shirts, vintage dresses, sunglasses, trainers; their own hair and make-up; their own cluttered rooms, ledges and streets, nothing tidied. For staged self-portraits, a simple costume or a printed T-shirt against a plain wall.

## Before you shoot it

Never prompt by the photographers' names or present a generated image as their work; never generate minors, or anyone nude or in underwear, in this mode; keep generated self-portraits playful and self-directed rather than sexualised, and prefer commissioning or crediting photographers who work this way. Never present a generated image as a 1990s photograph or as a page from these photobooks; label it as AI-generated.

## Photographs

- Hiromix, Girls Blue, Tokyo: Rockin' On, 1996. © Hiromix. In copyright, linked: https://single-eyelid.com/products/girls-blue
- Yurie Nagashima, from the series empty white room, 1994, chromogenic print. Shown in Nagashima Yurie: And a Pinch of Irony with a Hint of Love, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2017. © Yurie Nagashima. In copyright, linked: https://topmuseum.jp/exhibition/2850/?lang=en
- Yurie Nagashima, Self-Portrait (Brother #34), 1993. Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (10112694). © Yurie Nagashima. In copyright, linked: https://collection.topmuseum.jp/Publish/detailPage/7292/
- Mika Ninagawa, from 17 9 '97 (Tokyo: Metalogue, 1998). © mika ninagawa, Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery. In copyright, linked: https://www.nippon.com/en/images/i00054/
- Yurie Nagashima, Tank Girl, 1994, chromogenic print. Shown in Nagashima Yurie: And a Pinch of Irony with a Hint of Love, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2017. © Yurie Nagashima. In copyright, linked: https://topmuseum.jp/exhibition/2850/?lang=en

## Sources

- Seiichi Tsuchiya, 女の子写真 (Girls' photography), Artwords, artscape: https://artscape.jp/artword/5771/ (a late-1990s trend in Japan; HIROMIX, Yurie Nagashima and Mika Ninagawa, then in their late teens and early twenties; family, friends, themselves and everyday scenes; mostly taken with cheap, fashionable compact cameras; peak with the joint Kimura Ihei Award in 2001; Iizawa's Shutter & Love, INFAS 1996)
- Nagashima Yurie: No One Else Was Doing It, So I Had to Do It Myself (2020), interview by Goroku Miwa, Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan translation series, 2021 (originally The Fashion Post, 24 April 2020): https://contents.artplatform.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/APJ_202104_Nagashima2020.pdf (the usual description: girls capturing themselves, friends and daily life close up with easy compact cameras; Iizawa's Shutter & Love, 1996, and 'Onna no ko shashin' no jidai, 2010; Nakako Hayashi's 'Snap Feminism' in Studio Voice, August 1995, and the name 'girly photo'; p. 8: Iizawa's claim that Araki and Nan Goldin, featured in his magazine déjà-vu, influenced the movement, against Nagashima's own influences, CD jackets and the imported i-D and The Face flicked through in record stores; Nagashima's 2020 book contesting the label)
- Cameron W. Barr, Hiromix Frames a For-the-Moment Japan, The Christian Science Monitor, 7 May 1997: https://csmonitor.com/1997/0507/050797.feat.arts.2.html (an inexpensive autofocus Big Mini; friends, cat, room, food and herself; vintage clothes and retro sunglasses; Girls Blue, Rockin' On, September 1996; Iizawa: 'a participant and an observer', 'girl photographers', 'cute' culture; Nagashima's 1993 exhibition started the interest)
- Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Nagashima Yurie: And a Pinch of Irony with a Hint of Love (30 September–26 November 2017): https://topmuseum.jp/exhibition/2850/?lang=en (PARCO Prize at URBANART #2, 1993; 26th Kimura Ihei Award in 2001 for Pastime Paradise; Self-Portrait (Brother #34), 1993, gelatin silver print; empty white room and Tank Girl, 1994, chromogenic prints)
- Tokyo Photographic Art Museum collection record, Self-Portrait (Brother #34), 1993, accession 10112694: https://collection.topmuseum.jp/Publish/detailPage/7292/ (and the other 1993 Self-Portrait prints of her brother, mother and father)
- Kimura Ihei Award, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimura_Ihei_Award (award for 2000 to Yurie Nagashima, Hiromix and Mika Ninagawa, 'the unprecedented awarding of three prizes, each to a female photographer')
- Hiromix, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiromix (born 1976; 11th New Cosmos of Photography award, March 1995, nominated by Nobuyoshi Araki for Seventeen Girl Days; Girls Blue 1996; Hiromix, Steidl 1998, edited by Patrick Remy; Kimura Ihei Award for Hiromix Works; point-and-shoot cameras and purikura culture)
- Yurie Nagashima, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurie_Nagashima (born 1973; 1993 URBANART prize for photographs of herself and her family in the nude; photobooks; 2020 book from her master's dissertation arguing that a gender-biased narrative dismissed the movement)
- Mika Ninagawa, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_Ninagawa (born 1972; emerged in the late 1990s 'Girly Photo' movement; brightly coloured photographs of flowers, goldfish and landscapes; 1996 Hitotsubo Ten Grand Prize and New Cosmos of Photography award; 26th Kimura Ihei Award)
- National Diet Library records: Girls Blue (Rockin' On, 1996.9) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000136-I1971430859739865654 ; Hikari (Rockin' On, 1997.8) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002662557 ; Hiromix Works (Rockin' On, 2000.4) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002958220 ; Pastime Paradise (Madra, 2000.12) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002960199 ; Ninagawa, 17 9 '97 (Metalogue, 1998.2) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002663171 ; Sugar and Spice (Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2000.12) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002944271 ; Pink Rose Suite (Editions Treville, 2001.1) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002945960 ; Iizawa, Shutter & Love (INFAS, 1996.5) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002538865 ; Iizawa, 「女の子写真」の時代 (NTT Shuppan, 2010.3) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000010715884 ; Nagashima, 「僕ら」の「女の子写真」からわたしたちのガーリーフォトへ (Daifukushorin, 2020.1) https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I030168027
- Hiromix, Girls Blue, josefchladek.com: https://josefchladek.com/book/hiromix_-_girls_blue (Rockin' On, 1996, 126 pages; listed in The Photobook: A History vol. 1; Gerry Badger on its upbeat pop-consumer lifestyle of clothes, shopping malls, fast food and young men, and its empathetic voice)
- HIROMIX and NINAGAWA Mika, Japan Photo Guide: https://www.photoguide.jp/txt/HIROMIX and https://photoguide.jp/txt/NINAGAWA_Mika (Hiromix used a Konica Big Mini compact, her first shot with it a self-portrait with the camera held out in front of her; Araki and Takashi Homma her influences and mentors; self-portraits every few pages of HIROMIX (Steidl), in a mirror or at arm's length; self-portraits in underwear and topless; the Girls Blue review lists buildings at night, a girlfriend's face with a cigarette in her mouth, a bed of flowers and a bowl of soup; Seventeen Girl Days as a 36-page book of colour copies of regular prints; self-portraits and photo diary as major themes; Ninagawa's Sugar and Spice and Pink Rose Suite, 2000, 'very strong and vivid colors', Kimura Ihei Award jointly with Hiromix and Nagashima)
- Marigold Warner, How self-portraiture helped Yurie Nagashima find peace in her own body, i-D, 11 July 2023: https://i-d.co/article/this-photographer-spent-25-years-taking-self-portraits/ (a male critic labelled her work 'onnanoko shashin'; many early self-portraits parody 1990s 'hair nude' soft-core images)
- Gill Princen, The Girl Behind the Camera: Hiromix and the Rewriting of Youth, Yokogao Magazine: https://yokogaomag.com/editorial/the-girl-behind-the-camera-hiromix-and-the-rewriting-of-youth (affordable point-and-shoot cameras and purikura; deliberately off-centre framing and raw colour; Seventeen Girl Days with half-eaten breakfasts, blurred faces and self-portraits in underwear; the self-timer and the tilted frame)
- Tomio Koyama Gallery, Mika Ninagawa: https://tomiokoyamagallery.com/en/artists/mika-ninagawa/ (Acid Bloom and Liquid Dreams, 2003, C-prints mounted on plexiglas)
- Lesley A. Martin, How Yurie Nagashima's Self-Portraits Interrogate the Male Gaze, Aperture, 6 August 2020: https://aperture.org/interviews/how-yurie-nagashimas-self-portraits-male-gaze/ (Martin on the early self-portraits' 'tripods and timers', and Nagashima on running back and forth in front of a camera on a tripod, 'acting a role and directing the scene at the same time'; 'My early self-portraits were a parody of Hair Nude photos, so I wanted my photographs to look similar to them'; compact film cameras used more only after she had a child)
- Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Nagashima Yurie: And a Pinch of Irony with a Hint of Love, List of Works (2017): https://topmuseum.jp/upload/4/2851/nagashima_2.pdf (the series Self-Portrait, 1993–94: nude portraits with her family and self-portraits 'dressed up in the guise of a high school student, a dancer and so on'; no. 022 Tank Girl, from the series Self-Portrait, 1994; empty white room, 1992–94, 'a kind of reportage work' among punk bands, art-school classmates and people met on the street; Family, 1994–97, which 'in contrast to her debut work, a series of set-up photographs ... casually captures the fleeting expressions and humorous gestures' of family life, shown with Catherine Opie at PARCO Gallery in 1995 and published by Kōrinsha in 1998)
- Kōtarō Iizawa, Ninagawa Mika: Photos of Fleeting Moments, Nippon.com, 4 June 2021: https://www.nippon.com/en/images/i00054/ (user-friendly compact cameras and colour photocopiers behind the 'girly photo' fashion; Ninagawa's earliest subjects self-portraits including nudes, family and friends, travel pictures and indoor scenes; a colour copier with a faulty colour adjustment gave 'oversaturated primary colors'; 17 9 '97 published 1998; from Baby Blue Sky, 1999, she moved away from pictures of herself and her friends; Pink Rose Suite collected advertising work and Sugar and Spice fashion work; flowers, artificial flowers and goldfish (Acid Bloom, Liquid Dreams) came after the 2001 award)
- Single Eyelid Books, Hiromix, Girls Blue (Rockin' On, 1996): https://single-eyelid.com/products/girls-blue (126 pages, 17 × 24 cm, softcover, ISBN 978-4947599445; 'full-bleed photographs taken since Hiromix was 17'; photographs of three spreads)
- Setanta Books, Hiromix, Hikari (Rockin' On, 1997): https://setantabooks.com/products/hikari (photographs of the cover, four spreads and the colophon: dusk skies over telegraph poles, wires and traffic lights in silhouette, a mackerel sky over a building, a fairground at night with its lights flaring, printed within black page margins; colophon HIROMIX「光」, first edition 8 August 1997, ISBN 4-947599-50-2)
- Konica Big Mini BM-201 instruction manual, cameramanuals.org: https://www.cameramanuals.org/konica/konica_big_mini_bm-201.pdf (Konica Lens 35 mm F/3.5, 4 elements in 4 groups; programmed shutter 3.6 to 1/500 s; focus 0.35 m to infinity; DX film speeds ISO 25–3200)
- Konica Big Mini (BM-201), Collection Appareils: https://www.collection-appareils.fr/x/html/camera-10036-Konica.html (made from 1990; 35 mm f/3.5; CdS programme from 3.5 s at f/3.5 to 1/500 s at f/16; automatic flash that can be switched off)
- Konica BiGminiを徹底解説, one-scene: https://one-scene.com/products/278 (Big Mini models and dates: BiGmini 1989, BM-201 1990, BM-301 1992, Standa and NOU 1995; Big Mini F with a 35 mm f/2.8 only from September 1997)
- HIROMIX, Japan Photo Guide: https://www.photoguide.jp/txt/HIROMIX (for Seventeen Girl Days, 1995: 'She used a Konica "Big Mini" compact camera', one of her first shots a self-portrait; girls blue 'contained many photos from Seventeen Girl Days')
- Cameron W. Barr, Hiromix Frames a For-the-Moment Japan, The Christian Science Monitor, 7 May 1997: https://csmonitor.com/1997/0507/050797.feat.arts.2.html (she 'picked up an inexpensive autofocus camera called a Big Mini')
- Mika Ninagawa interview, Nikkei, 28 February 2020: https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO55849100Q0A220C2000000/ ('私はずっと一眼レフで撮っていて、90年代の女の子写真ブームの時も、コンパクトカメラを1回も使ってないんです': she always shot with an SLR and never once used a compact during the 1990s girly-photo boom)
- Exhibition report on Mika Ninagawa: Self-image, Hara Museum, Digital Camera Watch (Impress), 28 January 2015: https://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/exhibition/685627.html (her first camera, bought used in her first year of high school, a Minolta X-700 with a single 24 mm lens, used for her first five to six years)
- Jörg Colberg, A Conversation with Yurie Nagashima, CPH Mag, 2020: https://cphmag.com/conv-yurie-nagashima/ (at university 'I got my own camera, a second-hand Nikon FE'; 'It was pretty easy to use a tripod and shoot myself'; the family nudes made in her third year)
- Lesley A. Martin, How Yurie Nagashima's Self-Portraits Interrogate the Male Gaze, Aperture, 6 August 2020: https://aperture.org/interviews/how-yurie-nagashimas-self-portraits-male-gaze/ (the early self-portraits made with 'tripods and timers'; Nagashima: 'I don't have a cable release because I thought it wouldn't fit to my concept')
- Takashima Megumi, review of Nagashima's 2020 book, artscape, 15 May 2020: https://artscape.jp/report/review/10161624_1735.html ('長島自身はデビュー当時から一眼レフカメラを使用しており': Nagashima herself used an SLR from her debut)

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From Lumogeny (https://lumogeny.com/), a service of Van Riel Online Services. The shoot sheet for your own camera, lenses and lights is on the page: https://lumogeny.com/styles/onnanoko-shashin/#sheet