At OFFSCREEN Paris, taking place at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpetriere October 20-25, 2026, La Patinoire Royale Bach presents 4 works from Ken Ohara's monumental portrait series GRAIN (1993).
In 1970, while working as an assistant to Hiro and Richard Avedon, Ken Ohara emerged as a young artist with his seminal ONE series. Using a set of strict parameters, Ohara created his systematic series of tight portraits of over 500 diverse New Yorkers in the same format, size and style: abruptly zoomed in and cropped on the neutral expressions. Uniformly positioned in the frame, and selecting only faces without facial hair or overly obvious makeup, the series is at once an exploration of homogeneity and diversity, individuality and universality. Nearly twenty years later, photography had expanded into monumental scales and Ohara revisited the series, selecting sixteen portraits for GRAIN (1993). Ohara prepared enlarged sheets from the negatives produced for the ONE series. Originally printed at 27 x 21.9 cm, in GRAIN the works were recomposed into 9 by 9 grids, forming large 240 x 197.2 cm portraits made of a compilation of 81 individual prints.
Ken Ohara moved from Japan to New York at the age of 19. His first book, ONE, was published in 1970 with the support of John Szarkowski, then curator of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1974, his work was included in New Japanese Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1974–75.
Selected solo exhibitions include The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2025); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2006–07); selected group exhibitions include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2019); Thomas Walther Photography Collection, Dessau-Robau (2012); Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2010); The Metropolitan Museum, New York (2004); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (1999–2000); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1974). His works are held in collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, among others.
