I am a historian of modern Japanese material and visual culture. My research examines how Japan’s social, political, and cultural transformations have shaped photographic practice and the mass press. I explore photography as both an instrument of state power and a medium used to challenge the state; the gendering of photographic technology and industrial design; the values embedded in the materiality of images and objects; the politics of museum collection and display; and the relationship between photography and environmental protest.

Contested Frames: Women, Photography, and the Politics of Seeing in Modern Japan (under contract with Duke University Press) reinterprets twentieth-century Japan through the work and media representations of women photographers from the 1930s to the 1970s. Drawing on archival sources not previously examined together, the book reconceptualizes Japanese photography as a site where state power and women’s labor were negotiated and transformed. It shows how, during total war, photography operated both as an instrument of imperial ideology and a space of agency for women; how in the Occupation and early Cold War it helped legitimize new political hierarchies and consumer identities; and how the postwar camera emerged as a gendered emblem of national design. Later chapters trace women photographers’ challenges to documentary realism and culminate in feminist counter-media practices that redefined portraiture, spectatorship, and bodily autonomy. Reading photographs alongside representations of their makers, the book argues that photography functioned not merely as documentation but as a social practice that structured—and contested—modern Japanese visual culture.

I am Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the SSHRC Insight Development Grant and UBC TLEF–funded digital humanities project, Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography. This open-access, open-source platform advances new critical approaches to the history of photography, feminist art history, and modern Japan.

I also co-lead the Critical Image Forum (CIF), a Research Excellence Cluster funded by the Office of the Vice President, Research and Innovation. The CIF is an interdisciplinary research collective dedicated to the political, ethical, aesthetic, and social dimensions of photography, image archives, and expanded documentary practices.

Research Interests:

Modern Japan

History of Visual and Material Culture

History of Photography

History of Technology

History of Gender and Sexuality

Edited Volumes

I am a co-editor and contributor to I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (Aperture, 2024).

Single Authored Journal Articles

“Inventing a Photographic Past for Japan: From A Century of Japanese Photography (1968) to the Construction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography,” History of Photography Vol. 46, Issue 4 (2022).

“Tokiwa Toyoko, the nude shooting session, and the gendered optics of Japanese postwar photography,” Japan Forum Vol. 34, Issue 3 (2021): 383-411.

“Ogawa Kazumasa and the Halftone Photograph: Japanese War Albums in Turn of the Twentieth Century Japan,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 2017.

Co-authored

Kasahara Michiko and Kelly Midori McCormick, “Sexual Politics: Photobooks by Japanese Women, 1969-79,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (May 2024).

Carrie Cushman, Kelly Midori McCormick, “The Women Who Built Worlds with Their Cameras” in I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1880s to Now (Aperture, August 2024) 37-54.

Public Scholarship

“A Century of Japanese Photography: Historical Reckoning and the Birth of a New Movement” in Sandra S. Phillips, ed. Focus on Japanese Photography. SF MoMA Digital Publications, 2022.

“Why was Japanese WWII propaganda on display outside the Met?” The Washington Post. November 9, 2021.

I was awarded the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute 2023 Open Scholarship Awards Honourable Mention for the digital humanities project “Behind the Camera” (January 2023). My article on Tokiwa Toyoko and the gendered politics of postwar photography was awarded the Japan Art History Forum and Japanese Art Society of America Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize (2018).