Shizuka Yokomizo "Dear Strangers"

Later last Friday night, after Katy mentioned this artist in class, I went through a library book I had checked out Thursday evening entitled Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video and actually found the photographer Katy had been speaking about, Shizuka Yokomizo. I will try and type up the article from the book and put it here.

Article I found online:

ArtForum, April, 2001 by Barry Schwabsky

COHAN LESLIE AND BROWNE

"Dear Stranger": On its own, the phrase that titles Shizuka Yokomizo's 1998-2000 series of photographic portraits is heavy with paradox. How can someone be at once dear--precious, beloved-- and yet a stranger? The sociologically minded viewer could find reams of data about the subjects in the details of their dwellings, furniture, and dress, but as familiar as the figures can seem, they remain distant, unreachable. Who are these people peering out from the kitchens, living rooms, and home offices that at once shelter and expose them? And why were they chosen?

As it turns out, what they share is nothing more than the fact that they occupy ground-floor apartments (in Berlin, New York, Tokyo, or London, where the Japanese-born photographer now lives) and acceded to the anonymous request they received in the mail: "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, her identity to be revealed only when her subjects received a print and contact information (so that they could let her know if they objected to their portrait being exhibited).

Maybe this background is irrelevant to the images. Wouldn't they be just as haunting if the subjects were Yokomizo's best friends? Or would they? Had the photographer and her subjects been acquainted, the particularly naked gaze in these pictures would have been far more elusive. There is an almost unreasonable intensity to this anonymous exchange. "It has to be only you," the photographer instructed her would-be subjects, "one person in the room alone." "It has to be only you" is a phrase one would expect to hear come from the mouth of a (possibly unrequited) lover--or maybe from a blackmailer or kidnapper describing delivery of the ransom. The photographer's demand seems at once seductive and overwrought; no wonder these people give in and yet maintain their reserve.

Another similar description I found on a blog:

"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."