all images from the series: 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2011)
Credit: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

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365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears is a the latest photographic series of LAUREL NAKADATE (previously featured on WFW) which documents a year of daily sobs both real and performed. The result is three hundred sixty-five color photographs of herself before, during and after weeping every single day for an entire year.

NAKADATE‘s performance was a disciplined, durational exercise that required her to “take part in sadness each day” during the normal course of her life. Photographs were made in her New York apartment, her childhood bedroom in Iowa, at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, and on planes, trains and in hotel rooms in places as varied as Talinn, Estonia, and Saratoga Springs, New York.

Taking part in sadness and not running from it. I originally came up with the idea when I noticed that on social networking sites like facebook or Myspace, everyone pretends to be happy all the time. There are all of these normal people, all around the world, pretending to be happy. Maybe it’s a performance that they’re not totally conscious of, but there are all these normal people doing these performances every day. People hold their iPhone an arm’s length from their face and do a self-portrait and put it up on facebook every day. These layman’s daily self-portraits became interesting to me because of the idea that the self-portraits had to be happy. So I thought I would do a performance every day where I deliberately turn away from happiness, and deliberately take part in sadness. So that’s how the performance was conceived. – LAUREL NAKADATE in conversation with ROBERT AYERS

And good news: you can view 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York until 25 June, 2011. Additionally, MoMA PS1 is presenting her work until 8 August, 2011.