Welcome 2 my Room
Maki made these portraits by pointing a Polaroid camera at his own computer screen, photographing the sex workers he was talking to on a Philippine webcam site.
Welcome 2 my Room was published in Marseille in May 2010 by Média Immédiat, the mini-photobook imprint Maki founded that year, in an edition of 72 signed and numbered copies: 28 pages, 24 pictures, digitally printed on satin stock at 10.5 x 7.6 cm. The starting point was a Philippine peep-show site he found in 2006, where several hundred people worked from home or from shared studios; over the years that followed the exchange became something other than a transaction, and the pictures (Polaroids of a screen, twice removed from the person in front of the lens) hold that ambiguity rather than resolving it. The title was issued as a trilogy of three mini books, and separately as a loose-leaf portfolio in a slipcase.
Born in Marseille in 1964, Maki is a photographer, publisher, DJ and composer of electroacoustic music who has exhibited in Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Canada and the Czech Republic. Média Immédiat, which he founded in 2010, has since published Onaka Koji, Morten Andersen, Ed Templeton and Ichiba Daisuke. His other books include Gûyu — Allegory and Timeshow Cinq from Timeshow Press, and Mono Vol. 1 from Gomma Books.
