Blind Date

Lieko Shiga's Blind Date is a staged, dreamlike photographic series built around couples encountered and photographed in Bangkok, their bodies and motorcycles caught in theatrical arrangements of artificial light and motion.

Working outside her native Japan, Shiga approached her subjects as collaborators in constructed tableaux rather than documentary sitters, using flash, blur and staged gesture to push ordinary scenes of intimacy and transit toward something closer to fiction or ritual. The resulting images resist a single reading of place or narrative, instead building an atmosphere of charged, unresolved encounter that recurs across the sequence. First self-published in 2017 by T&M Projects, the book was reissued by the Madrid house La Fábrica, which carries the ISBN cited here; the two editions share the same body of work.

Shiga is a Japanese photographer known for a highly staged, performative approach that blurs documentary and fiction, developed most fully in her long-term project photographing the Tohoku coastal community of Kitakama before and after the 2011 tsunami. Blind Date shows the same theatrical instinct for light and gesture applied to a different, foreign context.