Maybe the world of painting seemed too old-school, too much turpentine-and-sweat -- or maybe the impatient daughters of the bubble era simply wanted a quick, easy expressive medium. Whatever triggered the phenomenon, there was an unprecedented surge in the number of young women entering the photography departments of Japanese art colleges during the early 1990s.
The wave of what critic Kotaro Iizawa termed onnanoko no shashinka (the curiously translated English-language label was "girlie photographers") broke big toward the middle of the last decade, with personalities such as Hiromix and Yuri Nagashima exhibited widely and profiled endlessly in pop-culture media.
Their work -- snapshot aesthetic documentation of the little things in the photographers' everyday lives -- was immensely popular both with other young women, who could relate to it; and with males of all ages, who could take a peek at the private moments of teens who, no doubt mindful of who was buying their books, frequently photographed themselves wearing contrived faux-naif pouts and white underwear.