Mark Kitaoka
From San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Photographer
297 photos

About me

Surrounding each of us every day are the lives of people. Some individuals are people we know well - family members and those we call our loved ones. Others make up friendships, coworkers, and acquaintances. Some are faces we see every day or within the comfort and familiarity of our daily lives. The grocer, the crossing guard, the gas station attendant, individuals who we know by face, occasionally by first name, but consider them strangers to our private inner worlds.

The imagery I am compelled to capture attempts to explore the intimacy of human expression be it joyful or troubled, loving or angry. For all moments of humanity are moments we share both together and in isolation. Humanity can be displayed in a simple yet complex expression or the lifelong pursuit of dance, music or service. Some of the images I submit here are not of human expressions, yet convey the results of humanity, both in its most beautiful and most tragic forms.

The vast majority of images displayed here are of strangers - people whose names I do not know, yet are just as dear to those who know and love them as my own children are to me. For each stranger is someone�s son or daughter, a human soul that may know us only by our familiar yet unnamed faces, or perhaps only appear for a brief moment in our lifetime.

That razor thin line of a moment just after the past and an instant before the future is what truly intrigues me about the moment of human expression. It is said that a moment can never be recaptured, sealed only in one's memory. I have captured brief instants of human lives in hopes that I have conveyed a window to who they are in that moment. And if I have been successful, they are strangers to each of us no more.

Photographic influence:
Jodi Cobb
Yousuf Karsh
Henri Cartier-Bresson
John Loengard
Richard Avedon
Annie Leibovitz

Artistic influence:
Mark Rothko
Richard Diebenkorn
Robert Motherwell

Performance influence:
Yuan Yuan Tan
Vanessa Zahorian

Personal artistic critics:
Tracy Martin
Leigh Toldi
Larry Fodor
© 2006-2008 Onexposure Photography JS HB. All rights reserved.