TOKYOSTREETS
Written by Theo Kogod.
Towering monoliths of glass and steel rise high
above the Tokyo streets, casting long shadows as the
skies redden with dawn in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Before the day’s first light crests the horizon, many
have woken to prepare for the long hours of a day’s
work. In those first hours of the new-born day, people
flow like a river along the streets and railways on their
way to work.
Modern Tokyo is a city of contrasts. Fiber optic
veins carry information through the city’s technovascular system to pass information from the present to
the future, while the ancient Torii and Temples stand
as reminders of the life of yesteryears. Disney characters compete with popular anime titles for the attentions of children and adults alike, and western fashions
can be seen in storefront windows with kanji lettering
embossed across the glass.
A man in Shibuya holds his phone aloft, staring
through his glasses at his Android’s Gorilla Glass
screen. He stands still, staring at the screen as people
pass him by.
A woman stands with pursed lips on the brickcobbled curb of a Tokyo street, an argyle shirt hanging
from her in a tapestry of red-and-blue linework. She
looks out from beneath painted lids with a disaffected
gaze, pouting as she holds her phone in a limp hand.
These are moments of every day life frozen in time.
Just as Utagawa Hiroshige immortalized The
Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido with his stunning
ukiyo-e prints, so too do modern photographers
manage to capture the essence of a place at the exact
moment they witness its profound beauty. And just as
trains replaced the popularity of walking the Tokaido’s
long route for those traveling between Tokyo and
Kyoto , so too has the camera (or for many people, the
camera phone) supplanted the ukiyo-e woodcuts as a
preferred way of showcasing images of beauty.
But the arts of the past are no less beautiful to
modern eyes.
Street photography captures a moment of daily life
and preserves it for eternity. It need not be on the
streets, per se, but is focused on elements of daily life.
Plenty of photographs out there have captured a
well-rehearsed kabuki performance during a dramatic
moment in the story or the neon glow of the Tokyo
skyline at night. These make for great pictures any
photographer would appreciate, but the eye of a street
photographer is drawn more toward the transient
moments in daily life.
Two youths in gothic attire stand in the crosswalk,
white striping the black of their clothes and dyed hair
just as it does the pavement beneath their feet. They
raise hands in horned fists. Her hands make the
symbol used both for “rock on” and for a cuckold’s
horns. His hands vary the symbol—their extended
thumbs signing “I love you.” Crowds of people part
behind them, as they stand shamelessly in love.
Street photography is about the small moments in
real life. A black-suited salaryman who stumbles out of
a bar into the snow and spews vomit in the streetlight
of a back alley. A young couple kiss in a Tokyo park as
the autumn trees blush yellow all around them. Friends
raise their phone and take a selfie, oblivious to the
homeless man squatting on the ground behind them.
Neon lights cut through the dark ambience of a
nightclub as young people dance through a blur of
motion.
These are the sorts of moments that define street
photography.
The point of street photography is to go out into
the world and capture the moments that are all about
you. Each new experience in life gives the photographer a chance to capture another perfect moment. Or
capture an imperfect moment in the right light.
As people rush between home and work and
migrate between the bivouac of Tokyo shops, the roads
are not a place most people exist—but the space
occupied between locations in the constant grind of
movement.
But in the moments between places, someone stops
at a street corner, or runs their fingers through their
hair, or kisses their lover on a bridge in the rain, and in
that moment there’s a click as the image is burned into
the film or transmuted into 1’s and 0’s. The people go
on their way, but the moment is already set in time,
chronicled in light and memory.