Between 2010 and 2011, the photographer Komatsu Hiroko rented a retail space in Tokyo and turned it into the “Broiler Space.” She filled it with her black-and-white images of industrial sites, arranged floor to ceiling, and rebuilt the show every two weeks. This summer, that installation has been remade at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, where it anchors Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now. Drawn from Aperture’s 2024 survey, the show gathers more than 200 photographs, videos, installations, and photobooks by 27 artists. One artist, Tokiwa Toyoko, joined a women-only camera club in Yokohama in 1951 and soon began photographing the city’s sex workers. Another, Watanabe Hitomi, enrolled as the only woman at the Tokyo College of Photography in 1967, then shot Japan’s most violent student uprising of the era from inside the barricades. These photographers sit alongside Yamazawa Wiko, Okanoue Toshiko, Kawauchi Rinko, and many others. The exhibition’s through line is Japan’s social history as recorded by women, including the upheavals of the 1960s, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985, the rise and rejection of the “Girly Photo” label in the 1990s, and the institutional recognition that followed. “One can question the necessity to focus on a region or gender. But today, in a world of polarization, fascism, sexism, and homophobia, it feels urgent,” the curator Taous Dahmani told W Magazine. “I wanted each [photographer] to be celebrated.” —Clara Scholl