“Photo Album depicts various pages in the parents’ photo album in which a photograph has been removed. What remains are photo corners, hand written captions and the vague outlines of where the photographs once were. The overall quality of Otsuka’s re-presentation suggests that these were old and highly treasured images that were, for whatever reason, removed from the photo album. Here, by essentially photographing the absence of an image, Otsuka concludes her book by referencing the cultural value of photography in maintaining and even reinforcing the social function of the family. A family with history is a family with photographs. Yet what happens when these photographs have been lost, misplaced or taken? How do we account for a history of one’s family without photographic proof of this history? Otsuka’s work points to photography as a crucial apparatus in understanding where we come from and who (we think) we are”. Dr Marco Bohr, from Photomonitor

Collections: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; RISD Museum Collection; Wilson Centre for Photography, UK