A World Without Men

Let’s start with the myth of a Japanese girl. It’s July 31, 1993, and we’re in a gallery on the ninth floor of Parco, a department store in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood. The audience, full of artists, is quieting down after seeing a slideshow of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1983–2008), and a talk between Goldin and the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Our girl is twenty, and her hair is shaved, save for a little blond mop on one side of her head. At that moment she’s just another art student, though by the end of the year Yurie Nagashima will be a familiar name. She will be called a herald of a new era of Japanese photography, along with two other female photographers, Hiromix and Mika Ninagawa. They will become the faces of onnanoko shashin, often translated as “Girly Photo.” But at that moment, Nagashima is an unknown girl in a crowd, raising her hand, asking Nan Goldin a question.

In the myth, she asks Goldin about sex. The prominent art critic Kotaro Iizawa recounts her question in his 2010 book, . “An energetic girl asked, ‘I want to take photographs of people having sex, but it’s very difficult—do you have any good advice?’” he writes. But Nagashima remembers her