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by Tomoyuki Sakaguchi

Photographs: Tomoyuki Sakaguchi

Publisher: Sokyu-sha

84 pages

Pictures: 57 colour photographs

Year: 2007

Comments: Hardcover. Photographically illustrated gloss paper covered boards. Design by Koichi Hara and Takao Watanabe. 22cm x 31cm,

This Japanese photographer eloquently explores suburban scenes in and around Tokyo. With an eye that is both disquieting and beautiful, he is one of the many photographers contributing to the revival of interest in night shooting.
Martin Parr
--Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade: PhotoIreland Festival 2011

On overnight bike explorations of the Tokyo suburb of Tama where he lives, photographer Tomoyuki Sakaguchi creates a waking dream. Making long exposures with his digital camera, Sakaguchi transforms the tidiness of suburbia into a colorful dreamscape where cars seem to be the only inhabitants, and even they are asleep.

Tama is the location of Japan’s largest planned residential development, opened in 1971 on the heels of the Japanese post-war economic boom. In contemporary art and literature such planned communities often come to represent the notion of the soulless uniformity of the commuting class. Sakaguchi’s Tama is a more nuanced place, a place of beauty and magic and even whimsy. Still, there is an eerie evocation of surveillance inherent in these nocturnal images, made while Tama’s residents sleep unawares, which reminds us that any sense of privacy, individuality or autonomy we have in modern culture may well be illusory. JL --2007 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-up

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