The 66-year-old Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi was named recipient of the 2014 Hasselblad Award today in Tokyo. The award includes a prize of 1 million Swedish Krona (US$155,500) as well as an exhibition at Sweden’s Hasselblad Center in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, opening November 7th of this year. Joan Fontcuberta received the award last year. It is considered one of the worlds most prestigious for the medium of photography. The Hasselblad Foundation, who distributes the award, writes in a statement:

[Miyako Ishiuchi’s] strength of character and uncompromising vision has resulted in some of the most powerful as well as personal representations of postwar Japan. Ishiuchi’s work is extremely coherent and developing in a determined and distinctive way; using the camera and all of its aesthetic potential to investigate the intersection of the political and the personal aspects of memory Ishiuchi has been both a pioneer and a role model for younger artists, not least as a woman working in the male-dominated field of Japanese photography.

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