Throughout her career, Ishiuchi Miyako has used photography as a means of connecting the past and the present, capturing both the physical and the psychological traces of time's passage. In 2000, Ishiuchi began to photograph her mother, then 84, capturing close-up views of her skin, her thinning hair, and the scars from a cooking accident that covered about a third of her body. Consisting of about forty photographs, including some of the earlier images of her mother's scarred skin, the Mother's series evokes a posthumous intimacy in which objects are transformed into potent repositories of human touch. In 2005 the series was selected for the Japanese pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
