Tomoko Sawada is a photographer without a camera. Her work is based on the idea of manipulating existing photographic procedures and cultural mechanisms which are dependant on photography – such as the photo-booth, the high-street photographer’s studio, or the collective school picture. By this method, her work questions the nature of the photography as medium and its agency in contemporary life.

Sawada is one of the most interesting embodiments of instability, masquerade, self-multiplication and duplication, and chameleon-esque identity, to a point of self-shattering and dispersion into endless particles. In each of the series created so far, a similar group of different identities appear to mutually complete each other into the continuous repetition that can be called HerSelf, challenging Modern psychological notions of the Self.

Sawada is the feminine incarnation of Morimura Yasumasa, but Sawada returns to the basic questions and positions of the mundane, especially in relation to fundamental conventions of photography – as in her School Days project – where her image is shattered into hundreds of repetitive self-portraits. Sawada’s School Days series challenges the idea of modernisation in contemporary Japan, which assumed that the repetition of Western models of education can secure Japan’s future in competition with the West. It certainly did in many aspects, for the personal price pointed by Sawada. In her earlier series (ID400 and OMIAI) Sawada scrutinised the question of self-portrait to a point of self-harm. These were not a series of portraits as self-documentation or self-expression; neither a personal gaze on personal history and ageing as embodied in facial expression. Quite the contrary: Sawada’s series are ‘serial manufactures’, examining the cruel aspect of documentation through self-archiving and self sorting. In School Days, she serialises her own image – all the girls sitting or standing behind, as well as the teachers, are Sawada herself. Michiko Kasahara writes in this context that Sawada’s work is describing the forces of Japanese education system to “make children conform to standard ways of behaving, rather than respecting their individuality.”* In my view, Kasahara is implying Modernist values with expectation for separate individual presence. Since the feminine aspect receives here an extra dimension, as Sawada specifically relates to girls’ schools – I think that the works suggest Self-shattering in a schizophrenic manner, arriving at the point where one does not know anymore who is, how is or what is the individual enigma. School Days shakes fantasies of identity, memory, subjectivity and individuality. The photographic manufacturing line turns here into a production line of infinite numbers of shattered identities, as a schizoanalytic phenomenon of multiplicity.

By using the existing paradigms of the school picture, Sawada mocks and parodies the system as a manufacturing line for little bankers rather than thinking individuals or happy persons. The fact that Sawada can ‘fake’ any stereotypical image, and can stage any anticipation to what the woman is, shows how these images are the product of a highly sophisticated woman, who does not disclose anything, but chooses to present multiplicity as truth, reproduction as identity, and shattering as Self.

* Michiko Kasahara, ‘Life Actually; the works of contemporary Japanese women – love and solitude, and laughter for survival in japan’, in: Life Actually, exhibition catalogue, MOT annual 2005, p. 157