On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani delivered an inaugural address which valorized compassion, endorsed ambition and invoked the language of cooperative effort in service of an improved urban environment. Mayor Mamdani’s campaign was premised on the notion that the story of our city could be made infinitely richer through co-authorship. In a soundbite that instantly populated the annals of the internet, he expressed a fervent desire to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” It feels an appropriate motto for a new mayoral era.
At the Whitney Museum of American Art, collectivism underscores an exhibition highlighting early-career works by Japanese photographer Ken Ohara. The likening of “Ken Ohara: CONTACTS” to a 21st-century mayoral campaign is apt, insofar as both demonstrate a marked optimism about the potentialities of collective action. A collaborative project realized between the years 1974 and 1976 and culminating in the production of 24 photographic contact sheets, “CONTACTS” offers alternative models for photographic practice grounded in the transmission of a single camera among various participants.
It is easy to miss the Whitney’s lower-level gallery spaces, which often hide in the shadows of the comparably sensational programming located upstairs; still, I urge visitors not to skip the subtle and intimate presentation on the third floor.
Against the backdrop of a fragmented, post-Watergate America, Ohara sought to suture the nation’s social fabric with a participatory art-making strategy.
Born in Tokyo in 1942, Ohara studied photography at Nihon University before relocating to New York City, where he cut his teeth in the studios of Richard Avedon and Hiro. His 1970 work “One,” a project that focused acutely on the human face and its insights, struck a chord with John Szarkowski, then-curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski’s endorsement, deeply empowering for a young creative, catalyzed the artist’s most conceptual endeavor to date; against the backdrop of a fragmented, post-Watergate America, Ohara sought to suture the nation’s social fabric with a participatory art-making strategy.
In “CONTACTS,” that aspiration is realized. Demonstrating tremendous faith in the American postal system, Ohara mailed his camera, preloaded with film, to strangers across the nation. Recipients were instructed to shoot portraits of themselves, their immediate family and members of their local communities before returning the camera to the artist, along with the name and address of the subsequent participant. By 1976, the camera had traversed 36 states, poignantly capturing the likenesses of 100 Americans. Leisure and labor, love and friction, agriculture and industry, the domestic and the public-facing: such are the thematic categories represented in “CONTACTS,” their binaries porous.
Ohara’s project of collective photographic authorship is oft-replicated today, especially in vernacular contexts. There is an argument to be made that applications like BeReal and Aura Frame — by means of which photographs, typically shot on smartphones by amateurs, are collected and presented on a centralized platform — are derivative of the “CONTACTS” concept. A year ago, I participated in a journalistic project which involved the documentation of my spring break on a lent, analog camera, which I then returned to the project’s organizer. Granted, the tenor of this project was far less sober than Ohara’s. But collectivism and visual art are no strangers to one another; collaborative art-making practices have enduringly served as aids in navigating fraught sociopolitical climates.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic or cliché, I posit that art, cooperation and art that involves cooperation are salves for this affliction.
In the mid-20th century, Allen Kaprow’s “Happenings” and subsets of the Fluxus movement engaged communities of creatives in an effort to undermine the primacy of individual authorship which had long dominated the Western Art world, capital A. And the canon of contemporary art, typically defined as that which was produced during and after the 1970s, is rife with participatory projects, including Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1990 “untitled (pad thai)” and Félix González-Torres’ 1991 “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” which challenged stigmas around New York’s Southeast Asian immigrant community and the AIDS crisis, respectively.
Real affect feels difficult to come by these days. We are spoon-fed images tailor-made for us by algorithms we cannot begin to understand, the volume of which renders us desensitized to content both delightful and appalling. We employ digital services to more efficiently execute our banal chores, like going to the grocery store or doing the laundry. And we ask the disembodied entity on our computer for aid as opposed to our flesh-and-blood neighbor. In effect, we sequester ourselves away from a rich ecosystem of friends, foes and interlocutors. It is easy to pigeonhole oneself into isolation in the name of productivity, and I would go so far as to suggest that we are relentlessly encouraged to do so by companies for whom our acquiescence is profitable — usually at the expense of our sanity, social skills and lifeforce. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic or cliché, I posit that art, cooperation and art that involves cooperation are salves for this affliction.
“CONTACTS” encourages us to expand the scope of our attention beyond ourselves and to welcome difference. When we lean on the shoulder of a friend, ask challenging questions of our neighbor and listen keenly to their reply, and pass the mic (or the camera), we have much to learn. It takes effort to remove our blinders when we are constantly incentivized to privilege me over we, but the struggle is rewarding. Should we have any challenge along the way, we might look to Ohara (or to Gonzàlez-Torres, Kaprow or Tiravanija) for guidance.
Decentralized, scattered and decidedly stronger for it, Ohara’s vast project testifies to the merits of collaborative effort.
On the subject of “CONTACTS,” Eli Harrison, currently the Whitney’s curatorial fellow, wrote that “Ohara’s project is extraordinary in both its conceptual daring and its humility.”
Indeed, humble feels the most appropriate descriptor for the work at hand; its sincerity stuns. Who knew that the average citizen could wield a camera so skillfully? The sheer artistic aptitude of the project’s participants is striking. So, too, is the notion that “CONTACTS” affords us an honest picture of American life in geographies which often escape the scrutiny of fine art. Decentralized, scattered and decidedly stronger for it, Ohara’s vast project testifies to the merits of collaborative effort.
In Mamdani’s affirmation of collectivism and its transformative warmth, we can locate the axioms underpinning Ohara’s artistic approach: selflessness, curiosity and compassion among them. If, on that memorable day in January, you were touched by an inauguration speech lauding the generative capacities of community, “CONTACTS” might strike a chord.
The exhibit is on view until Feb. 8 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
