Yuki Onodera
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Work from Eleventh Finger
I saw some of Onodera’s work (albeit not this work) at Photo Paris this year, and I reencountered her work at Van Zoetendaal and decided to share.
“Paris-based Japanese artist Yuki Onodera makes intellectual hybrid art that plays in and around photography.
For this series of surreptitious snapshots of strangers in the streets of modern metropolises, she created elaborate cut-out lace-like patterns of enigmatic shapes and symbols, which she then superimposed on the photographic paper before she exposed the enlarged prints.
These flat photograms both shield and reveal the faces of the anonymous subjects, much like a mask, or a fan, or a lampshade. The quirky results could also be interpreted as cartoon-like thought bubbles that represent the visual thought patterns of the strangers in the photographs.
When asked about the title of this series, Eleventh Finger, she said, “Well that refers to the unknown collaboration of the subject (with ten fingers), and me as photographer with one finger pressing the shutter release.” — Jim Casper on Lens Culture