I’m a sucker for old family photographs. The walls in my home are overwhelmed with evidence of that. I just love the way each photograph documents a point in my life. I particularly have a soft spot for snapshots from the 70’s – those accidental and slightly softer moments captured – like me running naked through tidal pools on an uncrowded Spanish Banks against the backdrop of a younger (and shorter) Vancouver skyline. I guess I like them because they take me back to that time. They remind me of who I am and where I came from.

I recently stumbled across Japanese-born artist, Chino Otsuku (currently living and working in London), who has a similar preoccupation, only she takes it a step further than just slapping a few favourite pictures into Ikea frames and calling it a day.

Otsuku’s “Imagine Finding Me” series of photographs are “double self portraits”, pictures in which she transports herself back in time by airbrushing herself into her own childhood photos.

Wallpaper has the goods on her work here.

The latest project from London-Based, Tokyo-bred photographic artist, Chino Otsuka, proffers yet another piece of kodachromatic trickery, with a somewhat subtler approach.

Commissioned by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Otsuka’s show will be the first London outing of her renowned Imagine Finding Me series.

Preoccupied with her own history, Otsuka’s digitally manipulated photographs exemplify her understated artistry and elegantly articulated histrionics.

Images of Otsuka as an adult are craftily combined with snaps of the artist as a child, pinched from the family photo album. The resultant composite snapshots are both glaringly literal and astoundingly subtle musings on the contemporary relevance of the self-portrait.

Otsuka’s delicate photographic montages draw us into a world of fuzzy nostalgic wonderment. Acting as, in the artist’s own words ‘a time machine’, Imagine Finding Me takes us on a whistle-stop tour through Otsuka’s sepia-toned past – and we’re more than happy to go along for the ride.

For her official site, click here.

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Michelle Sproule grew up in Kitsilano and attended Bond University in Australia and the University of Victoria before receiving her graduate degree in Library Sciences from The University of Toronto. She lives by the beach in Vancouver and enjoys wandering aimlessly through the city’s shops and streets with her best friend – a beat up, sticky, grimy, and uncooperative camera.

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