Seeing Double With Fumiko Imano

Stuck into stiff-papered albums and hung in rectangles on relatives’ walls, the humble family photo is seldom thought about too deeply. These swiftly shot images are, however, precious artifacts that document generations of love, loss and change. The family photo has fascinated celebrated Japanese artist Fumiko Imano for nearly her entire life, providing the central inspiration for her prolific self-portrait archive stretching back over two decades. At first glance, the artist appears to never be without her identical twin sister in these off-the-cuff images—but look again, and a faint, scissor-spliced line down every shot of the siblings will come into focus. “It’s fake,” Imano says over Zoom from her home in Hitachi, Japan. “She’s just me, mirrored.”