http://www.lensculture.com/onodera.html?thisPic=4

Eleventh Finger photographs by  Yuki Onodera  Paris-based Japanese artist Yuki Onodera makes intellectual hybrid art that plays in and around photography. For this series of surreptitious snapshots of strangers in the streets of modern metropolises, she created elaborate cut-out lace-like patterns of enigmatic shapes and symbols, which she then superimposed on the photographic paper before she exposed the enlarged prints. These flat photograms both shield and reveal the faces of the anonymous subjects, much like a mask, or a fan, or a lampshade. The quirky results could also be interpreted as cartoon-like thought bubbles that represent the visual thought patterns of the strangers in the photographs. When asked about the title of this series,Eleventh Finger, she said, "Well that refers to the unknown collaboration of the subject (with ten fingers), and me as photographer with one finger pressing the shutter release." — Jim Casper http://yknow-interviews.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/yuki-onodera-photographer.html CBL: So to make photography into an art you have to try to do something different. YO: Yeh. CBL: And so basically photography is very good for cataloging and recording information, but your, eh, your photographs, they always try to strip away the context, and so who the person is, is not important, when is not important, eh, where is not so important. More important is just the artistic elements, like the composition or the shapes or the kind of poetic feeling of the light. YO: Yeh. CBL: So, eh, in a way you're, uh… The fact that you live in Paris and you are outside your context is similar to your photography, which is trying to avoid the context of the photographs. Is that right? YO: Yes, uh, yes. It's difficult for me to explain in English, sorry. Yeh, but I'm very interested in the what is photography, because now we are too much images and photography in our life so we life like air the images and photography, but for me the photography is very mysterious things because between… What you say the discovery photography we say, the nineteen… CBL: The nineteen century? YO: Yeh, yeh. Before the discovery photography… After is very different, qui? I think our experience is very different, so, but when I thinking about photography, uh, I always attach this point of view – what is the photography? If we have not the photo in our life, if we have never seen, eh, ourselves in the self-portrait, for example – no the portrait of ourselves – eh, our experience I think different. So I'm always… My interest is always in the photography, so that is why I try to something very difficult, not the standard photography. Sorry! Are you understand? http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/yuki-onodera If I were in...Shanghai I would go to visit the  Vanguard Gallery’s current exhibition, “Yuki Onodera’s New Works: The World is Not Small-1826.”  Yuki Onodera (born 1962) is a renowned Japanese photographer. She graduated from the Kuwazawa Design School in Tokyo, and she has lived and worked in Paris since 1993.  I could not find images for this show or installation views, so I have included some of my favorite Onodera works below from her ongoing Transvest series (2002–present).  You may view more images from this series by visiting Yossi Milo Gallery.   These images are life-sized gelatin silver prints of human figures in silhouette. From a distance, the figures appear to be characters easily identifiable by their clothing and gestures: a flamenco dancer, cowboy or boxer. However, closer inspection reveals that each form is a cut-out shape clothed in fragmented imagery of diverse subjects, including architecture, animals, streetlights, portraits, microscopic organisms, or landscapes.  The show at Vanguard Gallery in Shanghai closes November 3, 2012. Yuki Onodera, Alice, 2002. From the series Transvest, Gelatin Silver Print, 148 × 112 cm. © Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery Yuki Onodera, Robert, 2002. From the series Transvest, Gelatin Silver Print, 191 × 126 cm. © Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery http://cockasnook.blogspot.com.au/2008/10/transvest-by-yuki-onodera.html Alice Yuki Onodera (born in Tokyo, lives and works between Paris and Tokyo) Onodera’s black and white photographs explore themes of absence, anonymity and the equivocal - second-hand clothes fight gravity without any ownership, a pinhole camera captures ghost-like outlines of suburban houses, men and women dress in each other’s clothes.  "The series title transvest is a decoy, ironically shifting our attention to the clothes and whether they cover a male or female body. Rather than costume or covering , Onodera inscribes the surface of darkness with something that comes from deep within. We drop several orders of magnitude, from the mere outline of an individual to collected memories or total consciousness. Maybe it is the soul, or the history of our thoughts, or a vast cosmic awareness - but the poses of these actors quickly lose their relevance when we recognize the magical hieroglyphics they harbor. The artist draws us close through clever tableaux, then she opens the doors of perception to a reality greater than can be contained within a single being or even a troupe, inspiring a sense of wonder about the hidden territories embedded within these figures - and within us all." Dana Friis-Hansen

Eleventh Finger No.06, gelatin-silver print on fiber base paper, 155x102cm