Tokyo: a certain style. By Kyoichi Tsuzuki – a review
Filed in Reviews - April 20, 2007Tokyo: a certain style. By Kyoichi Tsuzuki. ISBN 0-8118-2423-3 Chronicle Books 1999 (and earlier Kyoto Shoin Co, Japan, 1997). Widely available secondhand.
This is a small format, 400 plus pages long, colour documentary of the inside of lots of apartments in Tokyo. Real apartments. From the small to the tiny. Not luxury and certainly not Hollywood.
There is a short introduction:
Let’s put an end to this media trickery, giving poor ignorant foreigners only images of the most beautiful Japanese apartments to drool over. Hence this book; I wanted to show you to real Tokyo style, the places we honest-and-truly do spend our days. Call it pathetically overcrowded, call it hopelessly chaotic…..hey, that’s the reality.
The book is suitably overcrowded too. The first time that I recall seeing pictures crammed up against the spine or split across the double spread without it seeming to detract. Here it adds to the sensation of a lack of space.
The photography is fairly straight. Mixed lighting? So let the picture go yellow. No lens gimmicks. Just lots of apartments.
It is oddly compelling. Just a little voyeuristic. Documentary but not dull.
Recommended.
The content of the book unquestionably fascinating. A real “behind the curtain” look at the way people live. The small size is a bit of an affectation but you are right, it contributes to the experience which is of course the point. How does one curate such a group of photos? I would be interested in that too – was it a chain of friends suggesting friends? An existing passion amongst urban Japanese to document their living spaces? Was it enabled or made possible through the web or email? I have to wonder about the process because it produced results so different from interior decor/housing publications. There seems to be something to be learned there, for a photographer, some way of taking a slice of reality that is unexpected and fascinating.
April 21, 2007 @ 2:23 am
My library has this book and I now have it on hold. Thanks!
April 21, 2007 @ 4:01 am
Dale,
I’m guessing it was friends of friends. There is a bit of a bias towards people involved with, or at least interested in, the arts.
As to the lesson…I think that it shows that you can do reality stuff without it becoming formalistic or boring. The subject matter helps of course, but also the approach of the photographer was important. I can imagine these same locations rendered sterile by another photographer.
April 21, 2007 @ 10:08 am