School days / B

Inscriptions

Signed and numbered, on reverse, in black ink, lower right: S.Tomoko AP 3/3

Label

In her School Days series, Tomoko Sawada replicates her own image in the guise of a schoolgirl to fill up a group school photo. Each girl in the photo is Sawada wearing the same uniform, but with slight variations. A school photo is a form of annual documentation that records individuals as part of a class and a member of a school, enforcing conformity to the group. Here, with each “different” girl in fact the same person, Sawada questions how individuality can exist in these kinds of institutions. Her use of photo manipulation and modified self-portraiture puts Sawada in a conversation with fellow contemporary artists in the Hood Museum’s collection like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura.

From the 2024 exhibition An Instant Out of Time: Shaping a Collection, curated by Alisa Swindell, Associate Curator of Photography

Exhibition History

School Photos and their Afterlives, Northeast Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 8-April 12, 2020.

This record is part of an active database that includes information from historic documentation that may not have been recently reviewed. Information may be inaccurate or incomplete. We also acknowledge some language and imagery may be offensive, violent, or discriminatory. These records reflect the institution’s history or the views of artists or scholars, past and present. Our collections research is ongoing.

We welcome questions, feedback, and suggestions for improvement. Please contact us at: Hood.Collections@dartmouth.edu