What I Am Doing (New Edition)

What I Am Doing brings back the abstract photographs of Eiko Yamazawa, who opened a portrait studio in Osaka in 1931 as Japan's first woman professional photographer. This new edition was published by Akaaka Art Publishing in 2026.

Please note: this book contains artistic nudity.

The story behind the book

Yamazawa studied photography in the United States in the 1920s. After retiring from portrait work in 1960, she turned to abstract colour photography that became highly conceptual. Her style had little in common with the mainstream of Japanese photography, so her work had not been studied in detail until recently. A major solo exhibition was held for the 120th anniversary of her birth in 2019, and she was included in I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now.

The book examines her career through her relationship with American photography, placing her work in a photographic history beyond national borders.

What is in the book

• Four chapters that move back in time: the What I Am Doing series of the 1970s–80s, her complete 1962 photobook Enkin, examples of the American photography she encountered, and early portraits and documents
• 224 pages, hardcover; text in Japanese and English

About Eiko Yamazawa

Born in Osaka in 1899, Yamazawa went to the United States in 1926 and learned photography as an assistant to the American photographer Consuelo Kanaga. She held many solo exhibitions titled What I Am Doing in the 1970s and 80s. Her work is in the collections of the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She died in 1995.