Hiromix: Seventeen Girl Days, or: The Revolution Arrives by Photocopier
A particular kind of art-historical joke that only becomes funny in retrospect; the 1995 New Cosmos of Photography prize is one of the better ones. Canon, a company that had spent decades persuading the world’s men that mastery came in the form of a bayonet mount and a bag heavy enough to cause spinal injury, handed its grand prize — a million yen — to an eighteen-year-old who had just left Saginomiya High School and whose winning entry was a thirty-six-page booklet made of colour photocopies of ordinary prints. Hiromi Toshikawa, trading as Hiromix, had beaten several hundred applicants with what looked, to the untrained eye, like the contents of a school locker. The untrained eye was, as usual, the one that had grasped the situation correctly. It was the contents of a school locker. That was the point, and it detonated.
What she had done, and what nobody quite had the vocabulary for yet, was to remove the teenage Japanese girl from the position she had occupied since the invention of the lens — in front of it, arranged — and install her behind it, holding the shutter and deciding what mattered. The snapshots were of friends, meals, private nothing-moments, made on cheap compacts and disposables, and they set their face against the sexualised, idealised versions of girlhood that male-directed media had been mass-producing for years. The blur stayed in. The tilted horizons stayed in. To a photographic culture that had elevated the perfectly weighted Kodachrome exposure into a moral achievement, this was heresy of the most cheerful kind, and it was endorsed, deliciously, by Nobuyoshi Araki, who nominated the series and was thus in the position of a wolf sponsoring the abolition of wolves.
The aftershocks organised themselves into a movement, though a movement is precisely what its members did not want to be. By 1996 the critic Kōtarō Iizawa had labelled the tendency onna no ko shashin — girly photography — gathering Hiromix with Yurie Nagashima and Mika Ninagawa, and there the trouble began, because the phrase told you nothing about the pictures and everything about the photographers’ age and sex, which was exactly the material the media wanted to work with. Nagashima has argued ever since that the term implied these women couldn’t handle serious equipment, when in fact the point-and-shoot was chosen because it was the right instrument for the job; when the three of them shared the Kimura Ihei Award in 2000 she considered turning it down. One sympathises. Being canonised under a diminutive is the critical equivalent of being given a knighthood and a nickname on the same afternoon.
The significance, though, has outlasted the argument about the label, which is what significance is for. Hiromix legitimised the photo-diary — the pile of pictures of oneself, one’s friends, and the ordinary furniture of a life — and young women across Japan promptly picked up cameras and started making their own. Look at that thirty-six-page zine now, made in a country already deep in Purikura booths and cheap film, and you are looking at the entire grammar of the phone in your pocket: the front-facing self-portrait, the photographed lunch, the deliberately unflattering frame offered as proof of sincerity. We have since built a global economy on the assumption that the unremarkable moments of a young person’s day are worth recording. A teenager in Tokyo established the principle in 1995 with a photocopier and won a prize for it, and the world’s picture-makers have been quietly living off her invention ever since without, in most cases, having the faintest idea whose door to send the royalties to…..
