Neon and noise: Creative impressions from Japan (Part 2)
- May 4
- 5 min read
Back in Tokyo: another short escape
A few months after my long weekend in Osaka, I found myself once again on a plane to Japan, but this time the destination was Tokyo, which I visited my first time in 2017.
Tokyo has been described countless times already and by much more competent people than me, so I’m not going to spend too many words to say what kind of city it is, its lights, shops, people making its streets so crowded, etc. What I can say is that it’s one of those places that works perfectly for all kinds of photography and especially for street photography, where every corner feels like a scene waiting to happen.
Before leaving I had contacted a couple of local photographers to join one of their workshops, since I was curious to see how someone else approaches the same city. We met in the late afternoon and started shooting as the light faded into evening, starting from Golden Gai, then moving mainly through Shibuya and Shinjuku.
Golden Gai is a network of very narrow alleys packed with tiny bars each one with its own personality, often allowing to host no more than a few people inside (sometimes not more than a couple!). The atmosphere is dense and intimate and very chaotic, but that’s what makes it so fascinating, even though nowadays it has become a tourist attraction. From a photographic point of view it is a goldmine. Layers of textures, signs, faces, light bouncing in unpredictable ways: you could spend hours there without even realizing it.
The workshop itself was interesting and walking together with other photographers that know the city certainly was a bonus, since they knew lot of hidden corners which I probably would never have discovered if I was alone. You stop more often and exchange ideas and observe how others frame the same scene, but at the same time there is always a subtle limitation: you are not entirely alone with your thoughts. Photography for me tends to work best where you are not explaining anything to anyone.
I still experimented with my multiple exposure technique that evening and the results were good, but honestly none of the shots I took that night are amongst my favorite ones.
Walking endlessly, always in shooting mode
The following days I went out alone. What makes Tokyo such a perfect playground for photographers is not just the obvious neon chaos of areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya, but also the continuity of visual interest. You can move from a crowded intersection to a quiet side street in a matter of minutes and both feel equally compelling for a nice shot. Even the underground spaces, the metro stations and the endless corridors connecting different lines are another perfect playground for experiments. I found myself stopping in areas that most people would probably just rush through, watching how light interacts with surfaces, how people move, how small details create unexpected compositions.
This is also where my multiple exposure experiments started to make more sense, since I find out that when I'm alone I can take all the time that I want.
For instance, I just said the underground is a cool place to shoot, but also at street level it can be very interesting: I found this entrance/exit for a subway station enclosed at street evel by a very interesting colored glass with a geometric pattern. Well: colors, patterns, lights...this is the combination of elements that could make me stop in a place for hours, and that's what I did!So I started shooting the silhouettes of the people going down to the subway or coming out on the street, capturing their silhouettes through this glass and some of these shots are amongst my favorite of the entrire trip.
A sleek man at a traffic light: an excuse for storytelling
One of the moments that stayed with me and that gave me the most interesting shots happened in a very ordinary situation: I was standing at a traffic light, waiting for it to turn green, so nothing particularly special.
In front of me there was a very sleek man talking on his phone. What caught my attention was not just the fact that he was there but how he looked. He was very well dressed, wearing a grey suit and a necktie, and most of all a hat that gave him a very distinctive presence: for sure a unique and very cinematic character, so I couldn't miss the chance to capture him with my camera!
While waiting for the light I started taking a series of shots. Later on I selected three images from that sequence that worked together almost naturally, so that they became a kind of triptych that I ended up calling “Itchi the Killer”, a small personal tribute to the movie by Takashi Miike (great one btw!).
In my head the story was already forming: this man was not just having a casual phone call, he was part of something much bigger! Could he be maybe a member of the Yakuza???
Maybe he was receiving instructions from his boss... Maybe someone on the other side of the line was giving him an order, something serious, like an order to kill someone from the rival gang...
Then, in the second image he hung up the phone, so he got the order and that's the moment where he was making up his mind. In the last image, instead, he's giving me the back and that's in my opinion the most powerful one: he knows all the details, where his target lives and how to get rid of him...in one word: he's ready to kill!
This is one of the things I enjoy the most about photography. The possibility of building narratives out of fragments of reality. A single moment can become a story if you allow your imagination to fly.
Well, in this case maybe the imagination was flying too much: most likely this man probably just received a phone call from his wife, reminding him to buy something for dinner on his way home or a small toy for their daughter, and that's probably the most realistic version of the story.
Anyway, who cares, that's the power of photography: for a moment I turned this guy (which I'm sure was a good man and never harmed anyone) in a potential serial killer!
When I think back to that trip, I do not remember a single defining moment, but a sequence of small ones: an alley in Golden Gai, the reflections in a subway exit...or a man at a traffic light who may or may not have been about to change someone’s life.
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