Ken Kitano

Being not physically present at the current No Found photofair in Paris i spend my weekend time cruising through their website and came along some interesting artists. One of them is the Tokyo-born Ken Kitano and his project 'Our Face'!

In this work Ken Kitano deals with the reflection of nowadays people and their culture. Traveling through his homeland he visited tons of imaginable social conurbations like festivals, sport games, schools, religious or working places and was giving them a closer look by listening to single lifestories combined with the taken portrait of each individual.

Piling portraits of 38 Singers of Kouta or Popular     Piling portraits of 30 Geikos and Maikos Dancing the Traditional Songs Originating in the Edo Period        Special Kyo Dance in the Spring Miyagawa Town Kyoto  Nihonbashi Tokyo Japan 2003                            Japan 2003       

By the time he placed and printed the so called 'Portrait of Our Face' of one individual over the taken portraits from other people belonging to particular groups in society e.g girls in Harajuku, office workers in Tokyo, people on isolated islands in the South, fishermen and many more. Placing the portraits above others, getting more and more during his journey, the contours of each individual are becoming increasingly blurred and the expression, the substance of the final portrait, hence is the most ambiguous one, including all faces and lifestories from before - 'OUR FACE'!

Piling portraits of 23 female Muslim in burqa          Piling portraits of 17 people who daoes holy having
village Nairia Bangladesh 2008                         a bath in the Ganges river India Varanasi 2008

Piling portraits of 63 Children at the Child Center   Piling portraits of 20 students in The fifth grader 

of Higashikawa Town Hokkaido Japan                    in Nairia elementary school in village Nairia Jessore

                                                      Bangladesh 2008

With this project Ken Kitano questions the current process and understanding of globalization and homogeneity focusing on collective identities and a single ideology around one center. For him this structure seems to exclude and ignore the people on the periphery or outside of the homogeneous flow. For Ken Kitano does not exist such a thing as 'the center' of the world, ruled by assimilation. Showing and unveiling the eternal variety of people, positions and places in his ongoing project, expanding throughout Asia, America, Eurasia and Africa.

Piling portraits of 60 people of Nammatsu Town        Piling portraits of 35 Esoteric Buddhist Monks of Participating in the Kishiwada Danjiri Festival       the Shingon Sect Studying at KOHYA Mountain Specialty 

Osaka Japan 2002                                      School Wakayama Japan 2003