Image: The Photographers' Gallery, An Un.titled Site
The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop is highlighting a new edition of 'What I Am Doing', the 2026 Akaaka Art Publishing volume devoted to Eiko Yamazawa, whose career is also included in the gallery’s current exhibition 'Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now'. The book focuses on Yamazawa’s abstract photographic series from the 1970s and 1980s and reproduces her 1962 photobook 'Far and Near', framing her work through a broader history of photography rather than a narrowly national one.
According to the bookshop listing, 'What I Am Doing' has been organized in four chapters and presented in reverse chronological order. The first section centres on the abstract series that gives the book its title, including works in colour and black and white, while the second reproduces 'Far and Near' in full. Later chapters present examples of American photography Yamazawa encountered, alongside early portraits and related documents intended to clarify the beginnings of her practice.
Yamazawa’s biography outlined in the book shows a photographer whose career crossed several historical and geographical contexts. Born in Osaka in 1899, she studied photography in the United States in the 1920s and opened a portrait studio in Osaka in 1931. The book notes that she retired in 1960 and then devoted herself to abstract colour photography, developing what it describes as a highly conceptual and experimental body of work. It also states that her work has been little examined in detail before and that she has been largely forgotten since her death in 1995.
The new publication brings together 158 plates and spans Yamazawa’s full career, including early portraits, photographs from her wartime evacuation, archival documents and images that show her engagement with modern American photography. Alongside essays by two curators based on recent research, the volume also reprints three essays Yamazawa wrote in the 1920s and 1950s, and closes with a biography and bibliography.
The bookshop’s August newsletter places the title within a wider group of restocks and new arrivals connected to 'Japanese Women Photographers'. That exhibition, organised by Aperture in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles and supported by a number of institutions, opened at The Photographers’ Gallery on 24 June 2026 and runs until 27 September 2026. It brings together the work of 27 women photographers working from the 1950s to the present, with more than 200 photographs, videos, installations and rare photobooks.
The exhibition includes Yamazawa among a roster of artists listed by surname first, spanning figures such as HARA Mikiko, HIROMIX, ISHIUCHI Miyako, KAWAUCHI Rinko, NINAGAWA Mika, NOGUCHI Rika and USHIODA Tokuko. The gallery describes the project as a rebalancing of Japanese photography history through women’s perspectives, with curators Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare and London-based curatorial collaboration from Taous Dahmani.
'What I Am Doing' is published in Japanese and English, in hardcover, measuring 297 × 210 mm and running to 224 pages. The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop is listing the title at £32.99.
