Kei Ono, Portraits for Me.

This is the third book in the series following “Blue Light” (2006) and “NEW TEXT” (2013), and is the culmination of a series of portraits of high school students from all over Japan that photographer Kei Ono has continued since 2002.

Ono began this series of photographs because he believes that high school students, in particular, are a limited age in which they are able to think hard and worry about themselves, and that their appearance is fundamental to who they are as people. I thought that by photographing them, I could get as close as possible to answering the big question, “What is a person?

We recruited subjects via the web and social networking services, received contacts from high school students who wished to “preserve themselves in photographs,” and traveled throughout Japan, regardless of the region. We would then interview them in advance about their motivations for applying for the project and the places they wished to visit, and then take their ideas into consideration as we created a single photograph. The series continued through a series of repeated exchanges.

After more than 20 years of uninterrupted photography, the series came to a halt in 2020, at the end of the series. It was due to a global pandemic of a new coronavirus. Photographers who take portraits are unable to meet people. The situation made him fundamentally rethink his very existence as a photographer, and at one point he even considered quitting photography. High school was also the catalyst for him to break out of this situation and resume photography.

It is no exaggeration to say that these students lost not only their school life itself but also many other opportunities, and were the most strongly affected by the Corona disaster in Japanese society. Witnessing their situation, I decided to resume my activities, thinking that taking portraits of these students at this time would benefit someone somewhere. And so, for about five months after the self-restraint ended in 2022, I concentrated on photographing high school students who had experienced the Corona disaster, and the series was completed.

By capturing the irreplaceable “portraits” of individual high school students and the “backgrounds” behind them, I wanted to record and capture the transition of the “Japanese landscape” itself. This series of photographs is not only a portrait for them, but also a portrait of the times.

Kei Ono Born in Kyoto in 1977, Ono graduated from Ritsumeikan University in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in economics, and from the Osaka College of Photography of Visual Arts in 2003. Since 2002, he has been photographing portraits of high school students throughout Japan, and after his photo collection “Blue Light” (2006, Visual Arts, Seigensha), he published “NEW TEXT” (2013, Akarasha). Other photobooks include “Darkness to Hand” (2017, silverbooks), “Record of Boys' Room” (2019, Genkosha), and “Mall” (2022, Akaakasha). He has also done numerous bookbinding photographs for literary books, including “Kirishima, bukatsu yamerutte yo” (Ryo Asai) and “Anda stand maybee” (Rio Shimamoto).