Self Portrait 365 / Part 1
Ken Ohara American, born Japan
Not on view
Self Portrait 365 reflects a collective interest by artists in the 1970s to mine their own experiences and personal identity through photographic self-portraits and diaries. For Ohara, this took the form of a yearlong exercise in which he paired a daily self-portrait he called “my inward view of the day” with an outward view of the world as he saw it. Composed of 35mm contact prints, the images are connected via a snaking accordion fold in a unique miniature album. Like many Japanese photographers, Ohara chose the book as his primary format, transforming his record of daily life into a sculptural form to mark the duration of a year and sparking a practice he would continue off and on for the rest of his life.
