Tomoko Sawada

Why Sawada Kept Using Self-Portraiture—Holding One Person Constant

Tomoko Sawada decided to become an artist while in junior high school under the influence of Noboru Tsubaki, then her art teacher, and later entered a two-year media-design program. In a photography class during her first year, she watched a video about Cindy Sherman and made a self-portrait for an assignment. Sawada later recalled that when she saw the finished photograph, “something fell into place” for her^*23. She continued to use herself as the subject because her interest remained focused on the relation between what can be seen from the outside and what lies within—between appearance and the inner self. She has also connected this concern to the ways people classify others on the basis of appearance^*23.

For Sawada, self-portraiture keeps the “same person” constant within the experiment. She has said that she has never wanted to become someone else; even in disguise she remains herself and, in her words, is multiplying or amplifying herself^*5. If every image used a different subject, the differences between photographs would also reflect actual differences between bodies. By holding her own body constant and changing only hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and expression, Sawada leaves a sharper question: why does the same person appear to be someone else? Self-portraiture gives her a controlled basis for separating visual signs of appearance from the judgments through which viewers turn those signs into a person.

In her statement for ID400, Sawada wrote that photography allowed her to make herself look like a model or actress, even as the distance between the self in the photograph and the self in everyday life grew larger^*4. At the graduation exhibition, Sawada was present with a shaved head, yet she has said that only about twenty percent of visitors realized that all 400 photographs depicted the same person. That response became one reason she continued to explore the relation between appearance and inner self^*23. Advice from her former teacher Noboru Tsubaki to maintain a connection with society also contributed to her expanding interest in settings where people are evaluated and classified, including matchmaking, school, and job hunting^*5.

“I-Photography” and Women Photographers in the 1990s—When the Self-Image Drew Attention

When Sawada began working in the 1990s, photographs in which young women turned the camera toward their own bodies and everyday lives received considerable attention in Japan. In Ich-Fotografie, Madoka Yuki considers the idea of “I-photography” (watashi shashin), a term used by Nobuyoshi Araki in the 1970s, alongside the rise of so-called “girl photography” in the 1990s. She approaches photographs of the self as a “mode of communication” in which the positions of photographer, subject, and viewer can shift^*7. From this perspective, the meaning of a self-portrait is not determined solely by what it says about the self. The relations among who takes the photograph, who appears in it, and who reads the image become part of the work.

Ayelet Zohar examines Heisei-era photography through self-presentation, gender, race, and class, placing Sawada alongside contemporaneous work by Yasumasa Morimura, Yurie Nagashima, HIROMIX, Mari Katayama, and Mao Ishikawa^*20. Sawada chose forms used to identify and evaluate people in social life—ID photos, matchmaking portraits, school photographs, and résumé headshots. At a moment when images of the self had become prominent in Japanese photography, her work asked both what version of the self is shown and how a photographic format prompts viewers to read someone as a particular kind of person.

ID400—Why One Person, a Photo Booth, and Repetition Were Necessary

Her graduation work, ID400, brought together the problem of “an inner self that should remain unchanged and an appearance that can change easily” through self-portraiture, a photo booth, and 400 repetitions^*2. Using herself as the subject holds the person constant while disguise changes only the outward appearance. Passing each version through the format of an ID photograph, a form intended to verify identity, brings the social function of photographic identification into conflict with the perception of one person as many different people. The repetition of 400 images shifts attention away from the virtuosity of each disguise and toward the clues viewers use to classify a person.

The function of the ID photograph also explains why photography itself is necessary to the work. In her statement, Sawada wrote that even a nonexistent person can seem to have their existence verified once they appear in an ID photograph^*4. In the history of institutional portraiture, Alphonse Bertillon photographed faces under standardized conditions in the late nineteenth century and used them as information for identifying individuals^*9. ID photographs are likewise used on the assumption that “this face belongs to this person.” ID400 retains that credibility while producing 400 personae from one body, bringing the photograph’s role in confirming identity into direct contact with its role in prompting assumptions from appearance.

The 2019 volume Filters + Frames describes the ID photograph as a small standardized frame that stands for an individual within an official document and places ID400 in relation to that standard. Madoka Yuki’s essay “The Official Self,” included in the volume, situates Sawada within the generation of women photographers who emerged in the 1990s while arguing that her work both uses and departs from the codes associated with that generation^*24. The central issue is the capacity of a photographic frame used as an official likeness to make many different versions of the self appear equally credible, rather than the search for a single “real self” among the 400 images.

The automated photo booth keeps distance, frontality, image size, and output nearly constant while reducing variations in composition and timing introduced by a photographer. Sawada has explained that she made ID400 in black and white to remove color and make the “same format” unmistakable^*26. For Recruit and MASQUERADE, she chose color to match the kinds of photographs that actually circulate in those social settings^*26. The camera setup, color, and image format therefore do not remain fixed as a signature style. They are determined by the social use of photography that each series takes up. Repetition and the grid make changing appearances comparable within those standards.

Repetition and the Grid—Why 400 Images Appear to Show Different People

After making Sign (2012), Sawada said she came to recognize her work explicitly as both self-portraiture and typology^*25. When images share the same scale and frontality, viewers begin to pick out differences in hairstyle, eyebrows, glasses, clothing, and expression, and to form types such as “student-like” or “office-worker-like.” The grid catalogs 400 fictional personae while making visible the viewer’s own criteria for producing those distinctions.

A “Photographer Who Does Not Press the Shutter”—Using the Automation of the Photo Booth

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum notes that Sawada describes herself as a “photographer who does not press the shutter”^*1. She uses a photo booth for ID400 and a commercial portrait studio for OMIAI♡, leaving the release of the shutter to a machine or another person. Sawada has also recalled that after she received the Kimura Ihei Award, debate arose in Japan over whether someone who did not personally take the photographs could be considered a photographer^*27. Authorship is concentrated in the design of the work: choosing the portrait format, constructing each appearance, deciding the number of repetitions, and editing and arranging the images.

In a 2016 essay on photo booths and automatic portraiture, photography historian Federica Muzzarelli places ID photography and the photo booth within a history of identifying and classifying individuals through the state, police, medicine, science, and anthropology since the nineteenth century^*3. A photo booth reduces the photographer’s manual intervention while repeatedly producing faces under prescribed conditions. Sawada uses that automation to detach the shooting conditions from her personal taste and retain the already familiar look of an ID photograph inside the work.

Katy Deepwell describes the photo booth as a device in which the subject positions themself within a predetermined space, focus, and format, without the intervening “eye” of a photographer adjusting composition or focus^*8. This description closely matches the conditions of ID400. Sawada reduces the individual viewpoint of a camera operator while retaining control over her body, makeup, wigs, and clothing as the subject. Repeatedly placing herself within the fixed conditions of a machine creates a more rigorous comparison in which only the appearance of the “same person” changes.

Sawada kept facial expression subdued in ID400 so that differences in wigs, makeup, clothing, and other aspects of appearance would be easier to compare^*27. Using the photo booth or portrait studio as it normally functions preserves social portrait standards—frontality, lighting, dimensions, and shooting procedures—within the work. Even when the shutter release is delegated, Sawada determines the format, disguise, repetition, editing, and arrangement.

OMIAI♡, School Days, and Recruit—The Faces Expected by Marriage, School, and Employment

OMIAI♡ (2001) uses the format of omiai matchmaking photographs, portraits circulated between families when considering a prospective marriage partner. Sawada went to an actual portrait studio and was photographed each time as though “a different woman had come to have her matchmaking portrait taken”^*23. The studio’s conventional lighting, poses, and clothing establish a format through which appearance is read in relation to a prospective marriage partner. A work from OMIAI♡ published by the Brooklyn Museum likewise presents this format as a color studio portrait^*12.

School Days (2004) presents every student and teacher through Sawada’s own body. Uniforms and the conventions of the class photograph align each figure as a member of the group, while differences in hairstyle, expression, and the way a uniform is worn are read as signs of individuality. Sawada has cited her experience attending girls’ schools in junior high and high school as one point of reference for the method of this series^*15. Recruit (2006) grew from her discomfort at seeing friends dye their hair black and converge on similar clothing during the job-hunting season; she responded by repeating the résumé headshot format^*13.

The background to Recruit also included contemporary dress norms that paralleled Sawada’s personal observation. A 1996 Osaka Kyoiku University study of 576 male and female university students examined perceptions and actual use of recruitment suits and reported significant differences in evaluation and use according to gender and the strength of respondents’ desire for individuality^*17. Job hunting evaluates individual ability and suitability while often requiring an appearance recognizable as appropriate for recruitment. Recruit makes this tension visible through a standardized résumé photograph and repeated versions of one body.

Matchmaking, school, and employment use photographs for different purposes, yet all three series select portrait forms used when people are registered socially, demonstrate belonging, or undergo evaluation and selection. The matchmaking portrait frames someone as a prospective spouse; the class photograph as a member of a group; the résumé headshot as a job applicant. Sawada reproduces these formats and repeatedly places the same body within them, making concrete the process by which photographed appearance becomes tied to the kind of person a social setting expects to see.

cover and FACIAL SIGNATURE—Reading Fashion, Individuality, and Nationality from Appearance

cover (2002) arose from Sawada’s discomfort with negative judgments of ganguro and kogal youth based on appearance alone. The series considers how conspicuous makeup can function both as an assertion of individuality and as conformity within a peer group^*14. In FACIAL SIGNATURE (2015), experiences of being mistaken in New York for Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and other nationalities expanded her question—“what do people look at when they judge an individual?”—toward perceptions of nationality and ethnicity^*14. Seigensha likewise describes the series as extending Sawada’s concern with appearance and inner self toward nationality, race, and identification through the face^*18. As her subjects expand from institutions such as school, employment, and marriage to fashion and perceptions of nationality, the work continues to focus on the impulse to infer a person’s attributes from details of appearance.

Mask and Veil—Bodily Performativity Without Playing a Role

Sawada has described her work as closer to a “veil,” beneath which Tomoko Sawada remains present, than to a “mask” through which she becomes a role^*5. She has also explained that she does not imagine a character’s inner life and act the part; she changes her appearance without referring to a specific person^*23. The focus is on the conditions under which “the same person” can be read as 400 different people.

In her essay for Modern Women, Yuko Hasegawa considers Japanese women artists of the 1950s–60s and those working since the 1990s through the idea of “performativity,” placing Mariko Mori, Rei Naito, and Tomoko Sawada in the later group. Here, performativity is a broad concept encompassing artistic acts, temporal elements, instructions or choreography, and structures that involve other people^*21. Sawada herself says she is “not acting,” yet the repeated placement of her body within established portrait standards prompts viewers to classify what they see. This reading rests on the way body, photographic format, repetition, and viewer judgment combine as a sequence of actions, without requiring her to perform the psychology of a fictional character.

ID400, 1998—Four Hundred Images and Grids of One Hundred

ID400 consists of a series of 400 photographs, though museum holdings and exhibitions sometimes present them in groups of one hundred. MoMA holds ID400 #101–200 as one hundred gelatin silver prints and dates the work 1998–2001^*11. The display unit itself encourages viewers to move between individual ID photographs and the grid as a whole, comparing differences within a common format.

OMIAI♡, 2001—The Portrait Studio as a Social Apparatus

OMIAI♡ is a 2001 series of color studio portraits that incorporates a commercial portrait studio into the production process. A work published by the Brooklyn Museum is a chromogenic print and can be viewed on the museum’s collection page^*12. Where ID400 uses an automated photo booth, OMIAI♡ makes the studio lighting, pose, backdrop, and photographer’s procedure part of the social function of the matchmaking portrait.

School Days, 2004 / Recruit, 2006—Reproducing Social Standards

SFMOMA holds School Days (2004) as a chromogenic print and publishes an image of the work online^*6. Fundació Joan Miró has discussed the work in relation to clothing, the individual and the group, and women’s roles in Japanese society^*10. Sawada’s official website describes Recruit (2006) as a series using the ID photographs attached to résumés^*13. Across these works, Sawada changes the photographic apparatus and social use to fit the subject of each series.

Self-Presentation in Heisei-Era Photography—Gender, Race, and Class

Writing about Heisei-era photography through gender, race, class, and performativity, Ayelet Zohar places Sawada alongside Yasumasa Morimura, Yurie Nagashima, HIROMIX, Mari Katayama, and Mao Ishikawa^*20. Madoka Yuki understands 1990s self-imaging as a form of communication involving photographer, subject, and viewer^*7; in Sawada’s work, these positions become particularly intricate. Photographer and subject are the same person, but the shutter is delegated to a machine or studio photographer, while viewers compare and classify large numbers of images. As the work moves through marriage, employment, and perceptions of nationality, one question persists: who reads whom, and through which photographic standard?

Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura—The Difference Between Referenced Images and Photographic Formats

The immediate catalyst for Sawada’s use of self-portraiture came in the first year of her two-year program, when she saw a video about Cindy Sherman in class and made a self-portrait for an assignment^*23. MoMA explains that in Untitled Film Stills Sherman did not recreate specific movies. She constructed female types familiar from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and B movies, and even modeled the format on publicity stills^*29. Sherman’s fictional scenes feel familiar because they activate codes of femininity learned through film and media. Sawada also produces many types from one body, but ID400 suppresses setting and narrative so that faces are compared within the same ID-photo format. Sherman works with types drawn from cultural imagery; Sawada brings into the work photographic formats actually used for identification and evaluation.

Yasumasa Morimura has inserted his own body into established images from art history, cinema, and media culture. M+ has presented Morimura and Sherman together as artists who reconstruct existing images through their bodies^*16. Morimura’s works are anchored in specific prior images—famous paintings, actresses, historical figures—that viewers can recognize and compare. Discussing School Days, Sawada has said that she does “not try to become someone” and does “not refer to a specific person”^*23. What she cites are the shooting conventions and social uses that make ID photographs, matchmaking portraits, school photographs, and résumé headshots legible as such.

Sherman, Morimura, and Sawada all transform their own bodies, but disguise serves different functions in their work. Sherman refers to female images circulating through film and advertising; Morimura to established images from art history and popular culture. Sawada has said that she avoids imagining a character’s inner life and acting the role, instead producing differences in appearance through wigs, makeup, clothing, and facial expression^*23. Placing those differences inside the fixed standards of ID or group photography makes it possible to compare how viewers infer personality and social position from appearance. Disguise becomes a method for testing how social portrait formats help construct a person.

The Bechers and Ruff—Fixed Conditions, Typology, and Identification Photography

Critic Marco Bohr compares Sawada’s repetition of herself as a single subject with Bernd and Hilla Becher and their visual typologies^*28. According to The Met, the Bechers used a large-format camera and standardized shooting procedures to record industrial structures of the same type—water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks—and arranged them in grids of four to thirty images for morphological comparison. The couple themselves called these arrangements “typologies”^*30. Standardized conditions and serial arrangement reveal shared structures and differences that are harder to perceive in isolated photographs.

Placed beside the Bechers’ typologies, ID400 reverses the relation between what remains fixed and what changes. The Bechers photographed many different structures under nearly identical conditions to compare formal differences among the subjects. Sawada fixes the subject as one person and uses the photo booth to standardize distance, frontality, and scale while changing hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and expression. The differences across 400 images cannot be explained by saying that they depict different people; the act of inferring age, personality, occupation, or affiliation from small visual signs becomes the object of comparison.

Within the history of portrait photography, another important comparison is Thomas Ruff’s Porträts. The Met explains that Ruff, who studied with the Bechers, combined their typological method and the seriality of Minimalism with the apparent neutrality of mug shots and identification photographs, showing that even precise frontal records of a person do not provide access to that person’s thoughts or feelings^*22. Ruff photographs many actual individuals in the same format, yet their inner lives remain unreadable. Sawada photographs one actual individual in the same format, and that person increasingly appears to be many different people. Standardized portraiture promises objective identification, while viewers continue to project psychology and social position onto the surface of the face. ID400 brings self-portraiture, identification photography, and typology together around this contradiction.

FACIAL SIGNATURE—Faces, Archives, and Surveillance After Sekula

In a 2025 essay, Noam Gal reads Sawada’s FACIAL SIGNATURE through questions raised after Allan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive,” placing the work within a history of photographic classification, archives, surveillance, and social control extending back to Bertillon and Galton^*19. In this work of 300 faces, Sawada’s experience of being taken in New York for Chinese, Korean, Singaporean, and other nationalities turns toward the gaze that attempts to determine nationality or ethnicity from a face. The title “Facial Signature” also evokes contemporary facial-recognition technologies that convert facial features into comparable data.

Gal notes that viewers repeatedly asked, “Which one of these is Sawada?” when the work was exhibited^*19. Although every face is Sawada’s, the attempt to locate one “real face” repeats an archival assumption that a stable individual can be identified from an accumulation of photographs. The contradiction between one and many that begins in ID400 expands in FACIAL SIGNATURE toward racialized looking and facial-recognition technology, reframing photographic identification in relation to twenty-first-century surveillance.

Feminism and Identity—Critical Readings and the Artist’s Own Position

Because OMIAI♡ and Recruit address appearances expected of women in marriage and employment, they have repeatedly been read through gender and feminism. The Brooklyn Museum’s page for a work from OMIAI♡ places it within the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, one example of the series’ reception in relation to women’s social roles and feminist art^*12. Sawada herself, however, has not presented “identity” as the stated theme of her work and does not define herself as a feminist^*25.

The works begin with specific institutions and norms—marriage, employment, beauty, school, nationality—while feminism and identity operate as critical terms through which those subjects can be read. Sawada repeatedly presents the classifications and evaluations viewers make at the moment they see a facial photograph. By passing one body again and again through portrait formats used in social life, she makes photography’s dual role visible: recording a person and socially constructing an image of that person.