Emily Gilmore- Ken Kitano

24 Guards, Tiananman Square in Beijing, 2009

Ken Kitano 

"our face- prayers" 

Pace/Macgill Gallery

32 East 57th street, 9th floor, New York

Ken Kitano has created 133 portraits that are "our faces" and each portrait connects to the relativism of prayer practice. He asserts that the idea of a prayer can be extended past religion. His portraits of Muslims directly relate to their daily prayer routine; however, his portraits of people from Hiroshima relates to praying for consolation after the trauma of the atomic bombs. In his more recent work, Kitano photographed protesters in Hong Kong, in which case, their non-violent protesting was a form of silent prayer.

 39 People Floating Lanterns Down the River Motoyasu
 in Memory of Atomic Bomb Victims
 on August 6, 2004, Hiroshima

Ken Kitano has been working on "our face" since 1999. He uses long exposures while shooting, and he layers the film strips of different people when he prints. So, each portrait can contain as many as 30 different faces layered on top each other. This process of layering blurs each subject's individual identity and emphasizes Kitano's ideal of spiritual unity.

23 Female in Burqa,Dhaka, Bangladesh

Kitano was born in Tokyo in 1968, studied at Nihon University's College of Industrial Technology, and became a freelance photographer in 1993.

images provided by http://www.japanexposures.com/2010/02/05/ken-kitano-gallery/