grantl@newschool.edu
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Domino
The Peekskill Project
Forestry
Remake/Remodel
Pictures Maps Shadows
Michelle du Bois
FOUND
Dancing
Pointing
Handshakes
GROTTO GALLERIE
bivouac
darque darque
Fortification
The Amorphousness Show
Estate
You Can't Get There From Here
TEACHING
Freshman Seminar
Sophomore Seminar
Landscape Photography 2007
Landscape Photography 2006
Vernacular Photography
Summer Intensive Studies
Color 2
Color 1
Still Photo 1
PATTI
Wildlife
Track & Field
Hip
Bumpkin
Weddings
Expose
Abjection
Destiny
PHOTO ALBUMS
New York City
Cambodia
Rochester
Minneapolis
Vancouver
Los Angeles
Santa Cruz
San Diego
MAGAZINE WORK
index magazine
SEWING
Sinking Ship
Averill Avenue
by Zoe Crosher and Leslie Grant
This project explores the larger-than-life persona and culturally-weighted sexuality found in the wonderous archive and visual fragments of Michelle du Bois. An American woman who traveled in Japan as a prostitute in the 1970¹s and 80¹s, she took, collected, kept and bequeathed unto us hundreds of tourist photographs, family snapshots, and pornographic images of herself.
These casual and amateur snapshots of her posing throughout the Pacific Rim propose a complex of disparate but interrelated discourses, including notions of the archive, the role of photography in relation to narrative, story-telling, and personal identity, the politics of private and public, her fetishization of the East and issues surrounding family albums and vernacular images. Her exotic everyday proposes an identity that rises from within rather than any social construct imposed upon her from the outside.
Our role as curators, explorers and editors of the archive does not place us as an authority, but rather as interpreters of her self-proclaimed identity. Through our re-presentation of elements from her archive in various forms from Œposed postcards¹ to Œthe Cindy-Shermanesque cluster¹, ultimately to a book, the private photographs of a prostitute are brought into the public domain, and her complicated and incredible story becomes part of a wider dialogue. Please email us at duboisproject@hotmail.com for more information.
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