TOKYO

Tokyo

It takes a lot of effort to perceive the familiar with fresh eyes. But it’s even harder to deprive oneself of the urge to exoticize the image of the hitherto unseen.

During the Magnum Workshop in Tokyo in 2014, I was torn between the inherent dependency on my photography masters and the desire to capture life itself, without preplanning. Although I’ve always stated it’s meant to be free of theoretical baggage, my project Tokyo is where lies the origin of the leitmotiv present in my latter works: the question shouldn’t be what to photograph, but whether to photograph what instantly appears in sight.

The project’s idea evolved during the course of trance-like meandering through the streets of Tokyo, being subordinate only to the intuition, in the shape of the situationists’ practice of dérive. In the result, the banal found ennoblement in the accidental close-up portraits and the depictions of hidden rhythms of the disordered metropolis.