Tomoko Sawada

is a Japanese contemporary feminist photographer and performance artist. She has been included in numerous group shows in Japan, Europe and the US. Her first solo exhibition was in 1997 at Japan's Gallery Chat. In 2004 she was awarded the prestigious Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award for Young Japanese Photographer as well as the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in the category of Young Photographer.

Sawada uses photography and techniques of performance art to explore ideas of identity, status, culture, individualism, and conformity through traditional and contemporary cultural methods of portraiture. Sawada's photographs are each part of a themed photo series in which she makes use of make-up and costume to dramatically alter her identity, such that each photograph appears to represent a different individual or group of individuals, when all subjects are Sawada herself. Sawada uses commercial photographers, photo booths, and her own studio environment with digital photo editing to represent hundreds of different identities. Tomoko's use of costume in her self-portraits draws inspiration from the work of Cindy Sherman. Her work also explores the way assumptions about personality are largely driven by Japanese cultural responses to gender, job occupation, and other socio-cultural stereotypes.

Career Sawada's earliest self-portrait photo series is Early Days from 1995 to 1996 made while Sawada was in her teens. Her next series, ID400, was created over the course of 4 years, from 1998 to 2001 using a public photo booth to take 400 different ID card style self-portraits while Sawada altered her appearance through costume, hair, and make-up changes along with altering her facial expression or even gaining/losing weight. Subsequent photo series continue to explore varying methods of altering Sawada's outward appearance then documenting these changes using single and group style photographic methods.

Early Days, 1995–1996 Sawada's earliest photo series.

ID400, 1998–2001 For this photo series, Sawada visited the same photo booth outside a train station in Kobe, Japan over the course of four years to create 400 different black and white ID card photos of herself.

Cover/Face, 2002–2003 Photographs in this series show Sawada attired based on trends of the Japanese youth culture and the influence of Western ideas of beauty. She dressed herself as a ganguro, described as a tan, California girl type idolizing the pop music star Namie Amuro.

School Days, 2004 This series shows Sawada repeated within the same large group class portraits as both the students and their teacher wearing a school girl uniform and then dressed as the typical school matron. Sawada finds ways of altering her presentation wearing identical school uniforms through changes to her hair style, accessories, and facial expressions, then the images are digitally combined to create the class, including a background.

Exhibitions and awards

Solo exhibitions 1997, Gallery Chat, Noir, Japan 1999, ID400, Clean Sisters Gallery, Osaka 1999, ID400, Cubic Gallery Iteza, Kyoto 2005, Schoolgirls – School Days + cover/Face, MEM, Osaka 2011, Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Group shows Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California Japan Society, New York Det Nationale Fotomuseum, Copenhagen Culturgest, Lisbon Z Platz Museum, Fukuoka, Japan Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne Japanisches Kulturinstitut, Cologne Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo; Kawasaki City Museum Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2004 The Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, France