This Week's Photo

Strangers (3)

Shizuka Yokomizo

1999

Yokomizo's Strangers (24) shows a great cumplicity between photographer and subject.

This series consists of nineteen portraits of single figures photographed through downstairs windows of houses at night.

Yokomizo sent letters to the inhabitants of houses into which she could photograph from street level. She asked the strangers to stand in front of their windows at a certain time in the evening with the lights on and the curtains open. The photographs show the people who followed the directions posed in anticipation of being photographed by an unknow photographer.

We are looking at the strangers looking at themselves in these photographs, for the windows act as mirrors as they anticipate the moment they will be photographed...the curious self-recognition or misrecognition in the windows.