Published in 1996, Shutter and Love documents a turning point in Japanese photography, when young women began using the camera as a tool for self-definition rather than observation. Edited by critic Kohtaro Iizawa, the book brings together work by 16 emerging female imagemakers including Yurie Nagashima, Mika Ninagawa and Saori Tsuji, many of whom would go on to shape the visual landscape of Japanese photography. 

Shot largely in Tokyo, the photographs are informal, diaristic, and unpolished: bedrooms, friendships, interiors, passing moments, reflecting a shift away from male-authored documentary traditions toward something more subjective and inward-looking. Often discussed in relation to the rise of 1990s “girlish culture,” Shutter and Love is less about aesthetic sweetness than about authorship — who gets to look, and who gets to decide what is worth recording. Today, it reads as an early and influential statement on intimacy, youth, and the politics of the everyday.