Tokyo Rumando is the artistic name of a young Tokyo photographer (1980) who, after a career in modelling turned the camera lens on herself. In carefully crafted scenes, she not only creates imagined characters but also delves into all the existing personas in herself.
According to Rumando she “is the photographer, the bystander, the performer, the theme as well as the director. Making pictures has no meaning if I cannot present the whole of my world.”
Rumando’s work reveals an intuitive drive for authenticity defying gender roles that the Japanese patriarchal society puts on its women. She plays with ‘the male gaze’ parallel to her Western predecessors such as Cindy Sherman, to produce her own vision of identity, sexuality and intimacy. In that respect she is part of ‘Girlie Photographers’, a phenomenon of the mid 1990s in which photography was discovered by women and advanced to a central medium of self-expression and ways of establishing an identity.
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