Tokyo (signed - last copy)

by Gerry Johansson

Photographs: Gerry Johansson

Text: Kamo no Chomei

Publisher: Only Photography

160 pages

Pictures: 95 black and white

Year: 2016

ISBN: 978-39816885-8-0

Comments: edition of 400 copies, 240 x 291 mm, hardcover, signed and numbered. Design by Greger Ulf Nilsson

“In the stately ways of our shining capital the dwellings of high and low raise their roofs in rivalry as in the beginning… how often does the mansion of one age turn into the cottages of the next.” — Kamo no Chomei

Tokyo is a visual journey through a city at once futuristic and obsolete, its visionary design worn out – like that of a past era. Johanasson uses photography to index the city, finding form and pragmatic order through accumulation and sequence, revealing the city's hidden, modular logic: lego-like segments, a basic square unit repeated indefinitely and in various sizes. These images are unpeopled, showing only the architecture of the city, a container of 13 million people, organised around mass movement and the funnelling of human traffic. Between the concrete, glass and steel, the occasional green life sprouts – miniature gardens in the narrow alleyways, or a cluster of flower pots lining the sidewalk. The architecture creates its own topography, and the city is glimpsed as the last outpost of a fading, mechanised world.

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