ONE: KEN OHARA

ONE (1970)

In 1970, while working as an assistant to Hiro and Richard Avedon, Ken Ohara emerged as a young artist with his seminal ONE series. ONE features close-up faces of more than 500 New Yorkers, suggesting an essentially thin boundary across all human races and genders.[...]

Over the next few years, Ohara accumulated 504 headshots which he presented together in the format of a telephone directory, first published by Tsukiji Shokan in 1970 and reissued in 1997 by Taschen Verlag. These strangers’ diverse yet uniformly positioned eyes, noses, and mouths challenge our conventional notion of individuality.

GRAIN (1993)
For the monumental portrait series GRAIN, Ken Ohara prepared enlarged sheets from the negatives produced for his ONE portrait series of 27 x 21.9 cm and recomposed them into a 9 by 9 grids, forming a large 240 x 197.2 cm portrait (total of 81 sheets).

Curated by Julien Frydman.