Dear Stranger, by Shizuka Yokomizo
For this 1998-2000 series of portraits, photographer Shizuka Yokomizo left several anonymous letters on the doorsteps of random ground floor apartments that read:
“Dear Stranger,
I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know…. I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening.”
The letter specified a certain ten-minute period during which the artist would approach, take the picture, and slip back into the darkness. She would only reveal her identity once her subjects received a print and contact information (so that they could let her know if they objected to their portrait being exhibited).
Yokomizo made sure that when the photos were taken, the light would be too dark outside to see her — it would only allow her subjects to see their own reflections in the window they were looking out of.
Still Life photography by Thom Atkinson
Excerpts of “A Triptych (abc)” by Eugenio Dittborn
a. The Running Omelet
4. The author owes his drawings to the straining of human bodies as they traverse great expanses; he owes his drawings to these bodies in the throes of violent physical exercise: these bodies issuing into photographs and abiding there, fixed, because question marks are fixed.
5. The author owes his drawings to observation of the human face in the course of rigorously regimented group occasions: luncheons, athletic performances, weekends at the beach, boxing events, weddings, underwater fishing championships, condolence calls, anniversaries, dance competitions, singing festivals; he owes his drawings to these rituals as shown on television, fables and in published photographs.
9. The author owes his drawings to the complementary and contradictory relationship established by the vertical and the horizontal when they meet, engendering the most fraught and fertile situation in the whole graphic language: perpendicularity and its only begotten son, the dot.
b. Track End
1. The painter owes his works to the human face, unique and generic in its somatic constitution, hunting ground of the photogenic, asymmetric in its hereditary configuration, apt for dismantling and reassembly in the production of dreams.
2. And he owes his works to the dyslexic schematism, stereotyped melancholy, intractable application, documented assembly and lunatic delicacy of the Photorobot and Identikit picture.
7. And he owes his works to the body of the photograph, embalmed in and by the photocopy, repository of photographic remains; he owes his works to the invention of the photocopy of the photograph, an invention that automatically chars, perforates, pales, iodizes, drains, congests, weakens, dehydrates, shrivels, shrinks, stifles, rusts, burns, salinizes, pollutes, tars, frays and erodes the skin of the photographic body, preserving it in destruction.
c. Toolbox
4. I owe my work to the observation of liquid secretions from the human body deposited as spills on fabrics, stains that disrupt, interfere, disarray, dishevel, interrupt and tinge, stains that stain.
5. I owe my work to watery substances, oily substances, spilt on absorbent, woven, dry, opaque canvases, unbleached linen, jute, sail canvas; I owe my work to the uniformly retarded movement of the aforementioned substances once they have penetrated the aforesaid tissues.
7. I owe my work to the use of proverbs, definitions, adages, anthologies, set phrases, litanies, riddles, verses, conundrums, all texts found ready-made in speech and writing which like public photography are common coin, dead stars in movement, commonplaces.
8. I owe my work to the connection and propensity for scenic conjunction between written commonplaces and photographic commonplaces, a connection that by shaking shifts and by breaking taints the over-currency in the commonness of these places.
(from The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Charles Merewether)
