This Week's Photo

Tatsumi Orimoto

Bread Man Son and Alzheimer Mama

Tokyo, 1996

'Bread Man' is the performance performance of the Japanese artist Tatsumi Orimoto, who hides his face under a sculptural mass of bread and then performs normal everyday activities.

His performances as this cartoonish caracter are not particularly dramatic.

As he walks or cycles around a town, his strange but not threatening appearance is usually politely ignored by passers-by: occasionally it engenders amused curiosity.

But the photographs representing these absurdist interventions are dependent on people's willingness and resistance to break with their daily routines in order to interact and be photographed with the artist.

Orimoto has also used his bread guise for double portraits of himself and his mother, who has Alzheimer's disease, a visual merging of her changed mental reality with his performance of physical difference.