One of my favorite young female Japanese artists is a photographer from Kobe named Tomoko Sawada. She is best known for photographs of herself dressed in different stereotypically Japanese female roles, from a geisha to a school girl to a kogyal. While accepting a photography award back in 2000, she said:
I was bound by an inferiority complex. When I started to take pictures, I loved my image taken in photos, which looked attractive and cute. I could make myself look like a model or an actress in pictures. As I looked at my pictures again and again, the gap between my real image and my image in a picture widened. In other words, my appearance could be changed easily, but my personality did not change.
The mock school photo shown above depicts Sawada as every single member of the class.
