Headless / Faces by Bishin Jumonji (March 27, 2010) 
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Introduction by Marc Feustel
With his series of headless portraits Bishin Jumonji was the youngest photographer to be included in John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi’s seminal 1974 exhibition, New Japanese Photography, at the MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) in New York. For this early series, Jumonji was interested in how identity can still be sensed from a photography where the face has been cropped. 30 years later with the series Faces, Jumonji has focused on the missing component of his early works. These composite portraits reconstruct a series of faces into hallucinatory portraits. He plays with the structure of these faces into forms that are both alien and also strangely familiar in a process that questions the notion of recognition.
Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: a self-portrait, photographs 1945-1964 (Flammarion, 2004) and the creative director of Studio Equis (www.studioequis.net), an organisation devoted to broadening access to the visual arts between different cultures, with a focus on the relationship between Asia and the West. He blogs at Weblink: eyecurious.com
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
Within the human body, the face is especially meaningful to me. I can imagine “a kind of face” by glancing at three pushpins stuck into a wall. Even from rough halftone-dot printings, the individual characteristics of each face can be easily detected. Inside my brain there must be some kind of “special cells” that react only to human faces.
These days I have been dreaming of taking pictures of someone’s face. What kind of portraits attract me? The answer may be integrated as follows: the portrait should have some freedom from an absolute moment, and it has to be considered like more than just a depiction of dramatic facial expressions. Furthermore, the most fascinating portraits will be unidentified ones until I shoot them.
Bishin Jumonji (1947) lives and works in .
Click weblink jumonjibishin.com or browse our archives
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marc Feustel, 高田 彰. 高田 彰 said: Bite! Magazineの日本人写真家ウィーク—> 今宵は十文字美信！ RT @eyecurious Day 3 on Bite! Magazine: Bishin Jumonji's Headless & Faces http://bit.ly/aouxoA [...]