Ken Ohara pictures experiment from Seventies on the Whitney

Opening October 10, 2025, on the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ken Ohara: CONTACTS foregrounds the artist’s radical photographic experiment that redefined authorship, collaboration, and modern portraiture in Seventies America. The exhibition options twenty-two photographic contact sheets and 4 associated archival paperwork from Ohara’s groundbreaking participatory challenge CONTACTS (1974–76). By relinquishing authorship and welcoming strangers throughout the United States to make use of his digital camera to doc their very own lives, Ohara cast a radically democratic portrait of American life throughout a interval of cultural and political upheaval.

In CONTACTS, Ohara preloaded his digital camera with movie, mailed it to a stranger, and invited the recipient to {photograph} themselves, their household and associates earlier than returning the digital camera to the artist together with the title and handle of the subsequent particular person to ship it to. Over two years, Ohara’s digital camera traveled to 100 contributors in 36 totally different states. By surrendering management and shifting his position from sole image-maker to facilitator and co-creator, Ohara remodeled pictures right into a collaborative act of social change.

The exhibition presents the ensuing contact sheets lately acquired by the Whitney in chronological order, preserving the order during which they had been created. Spanning the nation, the pictures supply glimpses into the mundane intimacies of American life: candid household gatherings, quiet home interiors, scenes of labor and leisure, and fragments of city and rural environments. Together, they type an enormous, unfiltered portrait of the nation outlined not by singular narratives however by the throughlines and repetitions of day by day existence.

“Ohara’s project is extraordinary in both its conceptual daring and its humility,” Eli Harrison, Curatorial Fellow on the Whitney and organizer of the exhibition, stated. “By giving his camera to strangers and inviting them to document their own lives, he created a collective, decentralized portrait of America narrated through snapshots and samples of everyday life.”

While rooted in analog pictures practices of the Seventies, CONTACTS introduces a type of image-sharing that shapes social media and participatory archives immediately. Its resonance lies not solely in its historic second, but in addition in its persevering with relevance to conversations about co-authorship, collective engagement, and the social lifetime of photos.

Ken Ohara: CONTACTS is organized by Eli Harrison, Curatorial Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art.