If you were to ask someone to describe a photographic portrait, they would probably say that it’s a picture that shows a person and that it was made with the intent to reveal something, however minute or large, about them. Inevitably (this is an easy guess), the photograph would have to include the person’s face (in particular their eyes).
Under most circumstances, this is a reasonable definition of a photographic portrait. It is, however, not necessarily the only one. After all, a photographer might find a way to reveal something about another person without showing their face. For example, Mitch Epstein photographed a dry-cleaned flag on a hanger that was part of his father’s possessions, and that said something about the father.
At the same time, it is when portraits are taken that both photographic power dynamics play out most openly.
In the world of photography, we have mostly embraced the notion that the person with the camera produces one picture as a portrait (even if a much larger number has been taken). That is a form of power. Even though you could argue that the photographer simply picks the best picture, there are many, many assumptions behind what “best” actually means.
In the world of physics, you can measure the point at which water freezes into ice: you will get a temperature that you can measure. But you cannot measure or determine in any even halfway serious way what exactly it is that makes one picture better than all the other variants (for photographers, this is a neat trick to conceal their power).
There is even more power at play in the larger societal sphere, given that even though on paper, all people have the same rights, the reality is that that is absolutely not the case. Women tend to have a lot less power than men, and people who for whatever reason do not fall into one of those two categories have even less power.
In the world of visuals (of which photography clearly is a part), power means the ability to control how others see you. People with power can determine how others can be seen, and they can also control how they are seen (that’s why there are so few in-depth photography projects about rich people — and so many about underprivileged people).
This is why typically photographers who are not male make vastly better portraits than their male counterparts: they know what it means to be seen without having the ability to fully control how they are seen.
Japan, one of the most advanced industrial nations, ranks among the least advanced ones as far as gender equality is concerned (“Referring to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Index released by the World Economic Forum, in which Japan ranked 118th out of 146 economies and last among the Group of Seven nations, the government acknowledged that its efforts remain clearly insufficient,” a story from a few days ago noted). That inequality is caked even into the country’s language: women typically express themselves differently than men (using different vocabulary — even for seemingly simple things such as when saying “I”).
Iwauko Murakami‘s Known Unknown intrigued me for all the reasons outlined above. The book features portraits made of women around the photographer’s age — her peers.
The afterword makes it clear that the project arose out of very personal circumstances — Murakami is from the region that was struck by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. After a while, the photographer realized the limits of photographing herself and reached out to friends she knew from art school.
The idea of the project — portraits in which the sitter’s face remains hidden — is simple. But I would argue that as is often the case with photography what the work ended up being about moved away from what it originated from.
The project is collaborative in the sense that without the permission of those in the photographs it could not have been made. Often, the scene is one of domesticity, and the photographer couldn’t just sneak into someone’s home and take their picture.
But in Japan, another person’s home isn’t the same as another person’s home in the US or Germany. In- and out-groups play a very strong role in Japanese societal life. A person’s home is their most cherished locale, the place of their most intimate in-group. If anything, this is the place where they can be truly themselves — and nobody else will see, nobody else will need to know.
Seen that way, trust must have played an enormous role during the making of Known Unknown: all of these young women allowed their friend into their homes and then posed for a picture as if she were in fact not present.
I’m not sure that all of the pictures end up reaching the same quality. In some, it seems clear that the person in front of the camera is trying her hardest to act as if she were on her own (resulting in the well known staged-narrative kind of feel).
But in others, that aspect has vanished. Magically, the viewer gets to see someone go about their typically rather mundane business within the comforts of their own home: you see a young Japanese woman being completely at ease with herself.
Any of these moments play out countless times in countless homes all over the world: people being people without pretense. But somehow, over the course of photography’s history, the medium has had such a hard time showing this, possibly because it is not “interesting”, possibly because it does not make for dramatic photographs… Who knows?
In her afterword, novelist Junko Takase speaks of the intimacy she senses in the photographs. And it really is true, these photographs are very intimate — without alluding to anything else.
Seen that way, the photographs are portraits. But they’re not necessarily only portraits of specific people (even though they are that, too). Instead they are a collective portrait of young Japanese women who were allowed to be — without judgment, without having to choose the right words or gestures.
Known Unknown; photographs by Iwauko Murakami; texts by Iwauko Murakami and Junko Takase; 68 pages; Fugensha; 2024
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