Ken Ohara: CONTACTS

Oct 10, 2025–Feb 8, 2026

In 1974 New York–based photographer Ken Ohara (b. 1942; Tokyo, Japan) initiated a kind of photographic chain letter, choosing a stranger at random from the local telephone book and mailing them his camera pre-loaded with film. The camera was accompanied by instructions directing the recipient to photograph themself and their family and friends and then return the camera to the artist along with the name and address of the person to whom the artist should send it next. Over the course of two years, Ohara's camera traveled to a hundred participants in thirty-six states—as far from his West Village apartment as Hawai'i, and as close as the Bronx. By inviting participants to document their own lives, Ohara relinquished photographic control in favor of portraying the country's vastness through the eyes of strangers.

Created amid the economic crisis and liberation movements of the mid-1970s, Ohara's CONTACTS foregrounds human connection during a time of precarity and societal upheaval in the United States. The work's title evokes the social nature of the project while also referencing its format by using the shorthand term for contact sheets—photographic prints that contain thumbnail images of every frame from a single roll of film laid out in a grid. Arranged in chronological order, the selected enlarged contact sheets on view here each tell a story of a distinct moment, place, and perspective. Like many of Ohara's projects, CONTACTS is created from a simple set of rules whose repetition results in the accumulation of a large quantity of unexpected images. What emerges from this generative structure is, in the artist's words, a "photography of possibility"—in this case, a fragmented and democratized portrait of everyday life.

Ken Ohara: CONTACTS is organized by Eli Harrison, Curatorial Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art

Generous support for Ken Ohara: Contacts is provided by David Bolger.