Tokyo Diary
My dear artist friend Kikuo Saito induced me to accompany him on a trip to Japan in the late spring of 2006, where I took photographs over a two-week span. These candid images of strangers and domestic exteriors were shot at chest level with a Rolleiflex given to me by my uncle, Harry Noland. Crucially, one looks straight down to the camera’s ground glass rather than directly at the subjects.
Conformity is woven tightly into the culture, although by then it was broken up more into generational and socioeconomic subsets than it once was. Rituals there are an oasis, a welcome retreat with codes of behavior and scripts to follow. Youth, in their seeming rebellion, conform to what is just another uniform, layer upon layer of carefully curated exterior choices.
There is alienation among these city dwellers, a distancing from oneself as well as from others. I was separated by language, custom and culture, but there is virtue in being an outsider. What I found there were presentations of self and surface: elaborate attention paid to exteriors, deliberate protection reflexively given to interiors.