Masayo Ito’s Standard Temperature, a collection of family portraits taken between 

1979 -1981, began its life as a student project for Ito when she was a BFA student at 

Musashino Art University’s Department of Visual Communication Design in Tokyo. 

In fact, it was her graduation thesis and garnered her the Department’s “Laboratory 

Prize”. Her biography characterizes Standard Temperature as “photos from random 

visits with Tokyo families”, which would imply she just pounded on apartment flats 

randomly until she found subjects willing to sit for portraits. The results, however,

belie such arbitrariness, and without any background knowledge — Ito’s own after-

word is itself ambiguous about who these people are — one feels sure that even if

not Ito’s own friends and family, Ito must have known these people fairly well to

capture them as intimately as she has done. 

                                                       — “Japan Exposures” by Kurt Easterwood, 2013