FACE

 One of the most recognizable artists of her generation, Tomoko Sawada is a Japanese contemporary feminist photographer and performance artist. For this contribution to our One Picture Book series, Sawada presents twelve self-portraits, each one showing her made up as a different ethnicity and cultural background. 

As playful as it appears to be, Sawada’s work has a very serious underlying message. In her own words, “All people—despite having different types of so-called “added values” such as nationality, race, religion, and language—are essentially and naturally equal human beings. This fundamental underlies my photographic work: I aim to point people euphemistically to the fact that humans share 99.99999% of the same genes.”

Each copy of Face book includes a randomly-selected original signed print of one of the 12 images in the book. - Nazareli Press