Limited-Edition Photograph by David Favrod

Aperture is pleased to introduce David Favrod’s L’envol´e de poussins, from the Gaijin series to our collecting audience. Favrod was selected as Aperture’s 2010 Portfolio Prize winner and his work was also included in the Aperture published book, reGeneration2.

David Favrod was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a Swiss father and raised in Switzerland. Growing up, he became connected to his Japanese roots through his grandparent’s stories about their culture and traditions. Upon turning eighteen he requested dual citizenship from Japan and was denied. He responded by exploring his identity in a deeper way, and became inspired to create the series titled Gaijin, meaning foreign or alien. Favrod says:

“It is from this feeling of rejection and also from a desire to prove that I am as Japanese as I am Swiss that this work was created. ‘Gaijin’ is a fictional narrative, a tool for my quest for identity, where self-portraits imply an intimate and solitary relationship that I have with myself. The mirror image is frozen in a figurative alter ego that serves as an anchor point.

The aim of this work is to create ‘my own Japan’, in Switzerland, from memories of my journeys when I was small, my mother’s stories, popular and traditional culture and my grandparents’ war narratives.”
—David Favrod

David Favrod (1982) graduated from the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2009. He was selected as one of 80 up-and-coming young photographers by curators from the Musée de l'Elysée for the reGeneration2 book and international traveling exhibition. In 2010 he was named as the Aperture Portfolio Prize winner and the winner of the Swiss Federal Design Award.

>Visit Favrod's website

>Visit the Aperture Portfolio Prize Page