Partners

"They are not strangers anymore," Mark Peckmezian muttered to us after the shoot, and that’s stuck in my head. Indeed, before shooting, we asked every subject, "Can we take your photo?" and explained to them the Portrait Project, which would be exhibited for one day at the Saitama Triennale 2023 venue. If we got their consent, Mark would give them posing direction during the shoot. It was more like a chat. "What book are you reading now?" "What movie have you seen recently?" And then, when we finished shooting, they were no longer strangers, because we got to know about them so much. And if we happened to pass them somewhere in the future, we would surely say, "Oh! Thank you for your help at that time!"

Mark's photography is documentary style. We didn’t have a list of people in advance, but just looked for "faces" in places where people gather, such as stations and downtown areas. Mark doesn't prepare locations for shooting in advance, and on the contrary, his photography style is to not move more than 10 meters away from the place he finds a subject. So, what kind of people does Mark find interesting? This will never be really clear. I don't know, but certainly it was different from the subjects of fashion photography. All the time, Mark tries to portray the charm of his subjects. He captures the personality and even the parts that the person may feel negative about as their uniqueness. This overlaps with the concept of Partners Studio, "portraying a charm that you cannot see by yourself."