^ 'Sex Kitten and Seoul' diptych 20x40" 2005

The ‘Michelle du Bois Project’ (2004-), a collaborative endeavor between Zoe Crosher (LA) and Leslie 
Grant (NYC), explores the larger-than-life persona and culturally-weighted sexuality found in the visual 
fragments and wonderous archive of Michelle du Bois. An American woman who traveled in Japan as a 
prostitute in the 1970’s and 80’s, she took, collected, kept and bequeathed unto us hundreds of tourist 
photographs, family snapshots, and pornographic images of herself. These casual and amateur snapshot 
(ruins) of her posing throughout the Pacific Rim propose a complex of disparate but interrelated discourses, 
including notions of the archive, the role of photography in relation to narrative, story-telling, and personal 
identity, her fetishization of the East, the politics of private and public and issues surrounding family albums 
and vernacular images.  Her problematic and slippery identity, culturally, sexually and otherwise, becomes 
manifest and celebrated through her personal experience and fragments.  Her exotic everyday proposes 
an identity that rises from within rather than any social construct imposed upon her from the outside. Our 
role as curators, explorers and editors of the archive does not place us as an authority, but rather as 
interpreters of her self-proclaimed identity. Through our re-presentation of elements from her archive in 
various forms from ‘posed postcards’ to ‘the Cindy-Shermanesque cluster’, ultimately to a book, the 
private photographs of a prostitute are brought into the public domain, and her complicated and incredible 
story becomes part of a wider dialogue. furthering recent interests in the tensions between the 
amateur and the professional, the casual snapshot (ruins), the larger-than-life persona and culturally-
weighted sexuality For more info, please keep an eye out for www.michelledubois.com in the future.