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While the discourses and practices of the Decisive Moment ruled the photographic scene of Japan in the postwar era (especially in the 1960s and 1970s), there has always been a parallel track of Slow Photography forming an opposition to the swift nature of the snapshot. Yet, parallel to this dominant discourse of the snap, there was a path that consisted of performative processes that preceded the photo-act, or, reorganizing images taken by the camera into new orders and modes of display and representation – such as series, archives, typologies, assemblages, installations and multifocalities, with new approaches to photography's materiality and spatiality.

The dominance of VIVO and Provoke started to crumple in the late 1980s with the rise of photographers such as Morimura Yasumasa and Sugimoto Hiroshi, whose oeuvre challenged the practices and dominance of direct photography of the generation preceding them. Ultimately, this change of paradigm was significantly coinciding with the entry en masse of women photographers into the scene, gradually coming to dominant the Japanese photography arena in recent decades. Photographers like Ishiuchi Miyako, Sawada Tomoko and Yanagi Miwa (among many others) marked the shift from the snapshot into the multiple practices of Slow Photography, and the growing significance of women practitioners in Japan's photography sphere. This transformation is what we seek to discuss in this panel – a shift in paradigm, the emphasis on seriality, archival practices, staged and performative practices, installation and three-dimensional/ material presence of photography, and the entry of women photographers to dominant the scene.