Dean Sameshima

What does it mean to be alone? In Dean Sameshima’s recent body of work – 25 monochrome photographs of queer men in Berlin porn theatres with sumptuous black negative spaces and blinding white cinema screens – ‘alone’ is a complicated term.

- Emily Steer

Soft Opening, London, UK

Each intimately scaled work in the series ‘being alone’ (2022) invites the viewer to step closer and peer into the rooms photographed, offering only small clues about the spaces and people they are observing.

Velvety matte black occupies large swathes of these pictures. Sometimes, light serves as an interior detail, illuminating drab rooms with fissured tiles, messy plaster repairs, ventilation pipes snaking across the ceiling and rows of seats bolted to the floor. Sameshima redirects the viewer’s attention from the on-screen pornography – the most urgently visible thing as far as his subjects are concerned – to silhouettes of the individuals that populate these tawdry spaces.