Tomoko Sawada’s contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series takes the face as its subject and disguise as its method. In the twelve four-colour plates gathered here, Sawada photographs herself made up to resemble different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. The book is small—sixteen pages, hardcover—and its brevity is deliberate. Each portrait is a separate performance, yet the sequence asks the viewer to hold all twelve in mind at once, which is where the work’s argument takes shape.
Sawada has described the project as a euphemistic address to a simple proposition: that people, whatever nationality, race, religion, or language is assigned to them, are essentially equal, sharing almost all of their genetic material. The photographs are playful on their surface and serious underneath, and the book form sharpens that double quality. A single image might read as masquerade; twelve in succession expose the arbitrariness of the categories being mimicked. The face becomes a surface that can be remade, and the making and remaking is the subject.
Nazraeli’s One Picture Book series gives each invited artist a compact, tightly edited format. Face, the ninety-ninth title, uses that format economically: image, sequence, and a small amount of text do the work. The constraint suits Sawada’s conceptual approach, which depends on repetition and variation rather than on scale or spectacle. The plates are reproduced in colour, and the portraits are meant to be compared—one against another, and against whatever assumptions the viewer brings to them.
Each copy includes a randomly selected original signed print of one of the twelve images, so the book is also, in literal terms, an edition with an original photograph inside. For collectors, the print gives the volume a physical relationship to the series it documents; the book and the print are two forms of the same project. Face belongs to a sustained investigation of identity and performance that Sawada has pursued across her work, and in this small, concentrated book that investigation is available in a form that can be held and read in a single sitting.
