What these forms [the collection and the series] indicate, and what photography recalls, wrought by multiplicity right down to the film, is the simple fact that the image is never <\/em><\/em>alone<\/em>.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Andr\u00e9 Gunthert, \u201cL\u2019objet sans qualit\u00e9,\u201d La Recherche photographique<\/em>, special \u201cCollection, s\u00e9rie\u201d issue, No. 10 (June 1991): 12.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, assuming from the start that their series could only gain meaning through quantity and repetition, some Japanese photographers produced vast sets of portraits composed of hundreds of pictures. Primarily based on an indexing of the real and the accumulation of documents, their work bore powerful connections with the art scene in New York City, where some of the most influential Japanese conceptual artists were based\u2009\u2014\u2009Kawara On, Ono Y\u00f4ko, and Arakawa Sh\u00fbsaku^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Japanese names are given according to common usage in East Asia: surname \u00adfollowed by first name. <\/span> then resided in New York City, along with photographers Ohara Ken and Sugimoto Hiroshi. These practices are echoed in recent artistic productions of the 1990s and 2000s that revive an interest in the listings and enumerations that conceptual artists expressed. The book often becomes the favoured medium for presenting these images, more on account of its formal properties (to be identified here) than on narrative ones. One need not list all Japanese works assembling portraits\u2009\u2014\u2009they are too numerous and too diverse; I focus instead on a few significant publications that associate repetitive page layout with photographs derived from studied, methodical picture-taking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n