lumogeny

Styles / Street & snapshot

Girly photo (onnanoko shashin)

1993–2001. Tokyo in the 1990s. Also called Onna no ko shashin or Girls' photography.

Where the lights stand
seen from above1 open skycameraSchematic, not to scale
  1. Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.

Where you have seen it

The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.

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.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Keep the snapshot's speed and flaws, the off-centre or tilted frame and the blurred face, and do not retouch.
  6. Sequence portraits with skies, food and objects into a photobook or zine rather than single showpieces.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

1 open skycameraSchematic, not to scale

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

  • Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Shadow edges
Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight. Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
Shadow depth
Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
Shape & form
Light from the camera’s own position (an on-camera flash, a ring light, a frontal softbox) fills every hollow, so faces and objects look flat, with little shape.

How the style 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.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

35 mmf/81/125 sISO 200

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

Then
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.
White balance
Daylight-balanced colour negative printed by a lab, with the built-in flash indoors; lamps and night lights shot without flash print warm and are left so (inferred).
Focal length
Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
Angle
The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Distance
Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
The photographer
The camera held at arm’s length, often turned on oneself.
Balance
The subject faces the lens; planes run parallel to the picture. The subject placed off-centre, balanced against open space.
Instant
A casual, unplanned instant, taken quickly.
Step 3

Direct

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.

Body position
Slouched, sprawled, cross-legged or perched on a step, an armrest or the floor.
Turn to the camera
Shoulders and hips face the lens straight on: direct, symmetrical, sometimes confrontational.
Head & gaze
Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye.
Arms & hands
Hands busy with a prop or a tool: flowers, a phone, a cup, a cigarette, an instrument, one’s own work.
Line & energy
Loose and unforced, as people stand and sit when they forget the camera, whether caught or coaxed by prompts.
Expression
Open-mouthed laughter, eyes creased: joy caught as it happens.
The moment
Ordinary photographs by and for ordinary people, or images that look like them.
With the sitter
An insider’s view of friends, lovers and family. The subject performs for the camera and shapes the picture.
Step 4

Style the set

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.

Clothes
Outfits the wearers put together to be seen, designer labels included: layering, sneakers, statement pieces.
Set & props
A real home, workplace or street that belongs to the people in it, not a set, with their own things and traces of use.
How much is styled
Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Step 5

Finish

Colour
Strong, dense colours. The colour of ordinary things treated as the point of the picture.
Film
A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed. Printed colour negatives: soft, forgiving colour.
Digital & other
Cheap cameras and their flaws: leaks, soft corners, built-in flash.
Post-production
Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
Shown in
The book as the main form of the work. Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads.

Stay away from sensual, heavy retouching, soft studio light, large-format sheet film, glamour & aspiration, high-contrast black & white, smouldering look, elongated & stretched, full glamour make-up and fully art-directed.

Where to see it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

In copyright, so linked

With other styles

Pairs with Diaristic snapshot photography. Both keep a diary of an insider's life with a small camera and its flash; take the diarists' persistence over years, but keep this style's self-portraits, staged parodies and bright daylight colour, and leave out their drugs and violence.

Pairs with Y2K digicam and flash revival. The digicam revival repeats the cheap compact, the flash and the photos of friends a generation later; if you borrow its date stamp and digital noise, keep this style's film colour and photobook sequencing.

The opposite: Provoke and are-bure-boke. The male Provoke circle made Tokyo rough, grainy and black-and-white; this generation answered with clear, bright colour of their own rooms and faces, so use Provoke to brief what this style is not.

The opposite: Hollywood glamour portraiture. Studio glamour perfects a woman for the viewer's desire; here women photograph themselves unretouched and on their own terms, so drop the key light and the retouching.

Sources

  1. 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)
  2. 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)
  3. 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)
  4. 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)
  5. 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)
  6. 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')
  7. 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)
  8. 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)
  9. 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)
  10. 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
  11. 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)
  12. 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)
  13. 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)
  14. 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)
  15. Tomio Koyama Gallery, Mika Ninagawa: https://tomiokoyamagallery.com/en/artists/mika-ninagawa/ (Acid Bloom and Liquid Dreams, 2003, C-prints mounted on plexiglas)
  16. 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)
  17. 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)
  18. 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)
  19. 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)
  20. 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)
  21. 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)
  22. 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)
  23. 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)
  24. 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')
  25. 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')
  26. 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)
  27. 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)
  28. 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)
  29. 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')
  30. 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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