Rie Yamada re-staged portraits from family albums purchased at flea markets and auctions. Yamada has made no effort to contact the families featured in the albums she’s used for her photo series, Familie Werden. Yamada used a self-timer and remote control in all her photos. For group pictures, like this one, she used Photoshop to combine multiple images together into one frame. Yamada usually had only one person assist her on shoots. But to create this image, Yamada needed six people on set to help with outfit changes and positioning. Yamada did her own hair and makeup whenever possible. For help recreating looks that required greater detail, Yamada would enlist the help of her sister, a hairstylist. Yamada concluded that many of the original photos she collected were probably taken by men. However, with the development of the autofocus camera in the 1970s, Yamada noticed family members were more frequently taking turns photographing each other. “I felt a voyeuristic excitement and sense of guilt as I was going through the family photos that I had just purchased,” Yamada says. “But this made me feel that it was my responsibility to fully understand the families and to portray all of the subjects myself.” For her series, Yamada set the following criteria: Any album she used for her project had to contain at least 100 photos, and she would only re-stage portraits where the subject was aware that they were being photographed. If Yamada was able to place the original location of… [Read full story]
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