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May 28, 2010
Shizuka Yokomizo's 'Dear Stranger' body of work is a series of photographic portraits done between 1998-2000 in which each photograph shows someone looking out through a window. It is premised on a non-existent relationship between subject and photographer.
They evoke Edward Hopper's images of urban loneliness: ---city-dwellers at night, alone in an overlit room, seen from the outside, through the frame of a window. Even if the window framing the object is not there the viewer is compelled to imagine an invisible immaterial frame separating him or her.
Shizuka Yokomizo Stranger No. 2, 1999; photograph; chromogenic print,
The artist has never met any of these people. She selected their addresses and then wrote an anonymous letter asking if the recipient would stand at a particular window, alone, with the room lights on, at a specific time of night so that she could photograph them from the street. The artist simply promised to be there waiting. If they did not wish to participate they could close the curtains, while if they chose to open the door to meet her the photograph would not be used. If the subject wanted to meet Yokomizo she would immediately discard the portrait from her series.
The "Dear Stranger" letter that Shizuka Yokomizo sends to her potential subjects reads thus:
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. A camera will be set outside the window on the street. If you do not mind being photographed, please stand in the room and look into the camera through the window for 10 minutes on __-__-__ (date and time)…I will take your picture and then leave…we will remain strangers to each other…If you do not want to get involved, please simply draw your curtains to show your refusal…I really hope to see you from the window
signed "Artist".
Before she takes her photograph she waits for a feeling of equality and mutual observation to develop between her and the person she is photographing. The subject has to be watching her as much as she is watching them.
In a latter body of work the artist has placed herself on the other side of the window and, by collaborating with her friends, she replaces the sense of physical and emotional distance with a world of intimacy and interiority.
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Doesn't this kind of work say something about authorial objectivity? It undercuts the supremacy of the photographer creator through an avoidance of involvement altogether.
Photographers no longer have the certainty of their own authority or that of objective vision; and in being aware of that they adopt methods that undercut authorial interpretation.