…not just those taken in reflective surfaces. That said, two recent photos at the Mirror Project:
Sliding under
Muddled reflection
Others from last year are here.
Donning cheap verisimilitude for .80 cents
The resemblance isn’t particularly striking, so I’ll alert you to the fact that this is supposed to be Ronald Reagan, circa the days he was public enemy number one in my book. I mentioned yesterday that on the way to Kazo, we got sidetracked by the sight of a huge 100-yen shop, and ended up spending close to an hour (and 3,000 yen) inside. Well, this was one of the things I came away with. I wasn’t really in need of a Ronald Reagan mask, of course. (Nor was I in need of most of what I bought yesterday, but it’s hard to exert self-control when everything is only 100 yen each.) However, it occurred to me that it would allow me to show you, dear reader, the type of thing one can buy in these stores for just a single 100-yen coin (about $.83 US cents), and you know I spare no expense for you. Actually, there were four masks altogether for me to choose from. In addition to the Reagan mask, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Nixon visages were also available. It looked like a modern day Mt. Rushmore. (Sadly, the one which presumably would be in greatest demand right about now, that of current public enemy number one Bush Jr., was not in stock or has yet to be manufactured).
Interestingly, the label for these all feature the image of Reagan (looking decidedly more like Reagan than the mask does). It did strike me as a bit weird that in a distant suburban bottom-yen discount store in Japan, they would be selling party masks for 4 former U.S. presidents. (In fact, with the exception of a plastic Edo-era chonmage wig similar to this one, these were the only masks or costume accessories available.) Why not a Junichiro Koizumi mask? Or perhaps even more appropriate for this part of the world, a Kim Jong Il mask?
Old portraits of self #6
I think this was taken around 1993, at the Scottish Rites Temple in Oakland, California. Some friends and I had gone there for a camera swap, basically a camera show cum flea market event of the type that is held periodically in various cities in the US. My friend Mark had bought some outdated Polaroid film for his SX-70, and we decided to test it out outside. Someone must have taken a shot of one of us coming out of these extremely heavy doors, and what started as a test became some sort of collaborative project on the spot, each of us taking turns exiting the door or taking a picture, and all of us being so taken with the discolorization of the outdated film, the random bursts of color here and there, and how that combined with the heavy-handed yet somehow tacky freemason imagery on the doors. We spent the afternoon going in and out of that door, trying on different expressions, and assembling and re-assembling the polaroids on the ground. A few days later color copies were made and we attempted to make a poster out of the photos, but as was typical in those days we started disagreeing about ownership of the photos and in the end we never made anything. However, some years later I took my set of copies and made a poster on my own, which you can see a photo of here.