Ken Ohara

Since the late 1960s, photographer Ken Ohara has concentrated his efforts on expanding the limited conventions for the human portrait. At the age of twenty, Ohara moved from Tokyo to New York in 1962. Eight years later he published his extraordinary first book ONE, which consisted of a series of uniformly tight close-ups of a multitude of diverse faces that he photographed on the streets of New York. A portion of this project was first exhibited at MoMA in 1974 in New York. Over the next thirty years, Ohara has continued his portrait studies, all the while exploring a variety of means to alter the interaction between photographer, subject, and the resulting portrait image. This retrospective book and exhibition considers for the first time Ohara's seven major projects that systematically explore a variety of elements that shape and reshape the possibilities of photographic portraiture. Ohara's series present striking results from his different approaches to defining the character of the portrait transaction - ranging from radical close-ups of hundreds of anonymous faces, to one extended self-portrait comprised of the photographer's self-exposure made every minute for a period of 24 hours, to journals composed systematically of one view looking outward and a second view including the photographer's image for each day of a year that the photographer compiled in the compressed format of the leporello or folded book. Also included in this retrospective are a collaborative series of photographs made by others for Ohara, and a more recent series of 100 portraits in which each "sitting" was deliberately designed to register the subject's dynamic contribution by lasting an hour. As photographic historian and guest curator Sally Stein proposes, in its rigorously varied breadth the work of Ken Ohara not only offers one of the most sustained examinations of space and time in photographic portraiture but also provokes a rethinking of the conventional limits of photographic depiction. Co-published with Museum Folkwang, Essen.