CJS Noon Lecture ~ "Strategies of Camouflage: Suzuki Norio's Photographs of Onoda Hiroo (1974) and Tsukada Mamoru's 'Identical Twins' Series (2003)"

After spending 29 years in the jungles of Lubang Island, Onoda Hiroo was discovered and photographed by Suzuki Norio in a sequence of frames (1974) that were later published widely in Japanese newspapers, eventually resulting in Onoda’s repatriation. I compare this sequence with Tsukada Mamoru’s "Identical Twins" series (2004), a group of images of two young men altering their dress between imperial military uniform or jeans and T-shirt, posing in a bamboo grove in Kamakura. My interpretation of the two series considers ideas drawn from photography theory, such as indexicality, photojournalism and the snapshot, as well as questions of camouflage and fictionality, and the social power of the photographic image.
Ayelet Zohar is an artist, curator and visual culture researcher, lecturing at Art History and Asian Studies Departments, University of Haifa. Zohar completed her PhD at University of London (2007), was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University (2007-09), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, working on issues of photography and camouflage. (This talk is made possible with help from U-M's History of Arr, the Charles Lang Freer Endowment, and the UMMA.)