One by Ken Ohara First Edition Coffee table book Rare 1970

 One by Ken Ohara First Edition paperback Coffee table book Rare 

First edition original book cover 1970

If you want to truly appreciate how everyone is different, how amazingly diverse human beings are, look at this book. There is nothing to read, it's a pure exercise in identically cropped and illuminated black & white faces with neutral expressions. Character, life history (or lack thereof for the youngest) shines through. Arguably, it had to be done in Manhattan with its diversity of human life.

One. While working in New York with Richard Avedon and Hiro, Japanese photographer Ken Ohara reconfigured the art of portraiture when he made an obsessive recording of tightly framed single faces snapped on the streets of New York and printed them with the same tonal characteristics, thus eliminating differences in skin colour. Through this, and through tight framing that locates the eyes, nose and mouth in the same position on each full-page bleed, he dispenses with the main racial differences. Other specific physiognomic characteristics that we think of as defining racial groups, such as slanting eyes, broad noses, or thin lips, turn out in Oharas compendium not to be nearly as important as the colour of the skin. Thus Ohara has taken the utopian step of using the camera to turn humankind into one big melting pot, his serial photographs making almost ritual atonement for the sin of racism 

First Edition paperback

Coffee table book !

Portraiture  / photography / art / racial differences 

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