Tokyo is Photography

Kishin Shinoyama
Tokyo is Photography

Photographs: Kishin Shinoyama

Publisher: Shogakukan

162 pages

Year: 1992

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 37,2 x 26,3 cm, color photographs. In very good condition other than traces of wear on the dust jacket, and foxing on both the dust jacket and few pages of the book. Four pages are a little scratched at the bottom or bottom (see pictures). Text in Japanese and English.

"KISHIN SHINOYAMA (TOKYO IN THE COMING CENTURY)

Tokyo-born Kishin Shinoyama is one of the most energetic photographers not only in Japan but throushout the world. He has taken shots of major contemporary stars, starting with Hibari Misora, John Lenon, Yukio Mishima and Tamasabaro Bando, and continuing up to the present with Momoe Yamaguchi, Seiko Matsuda and most recently Rie Miyazawa. Shinoyama has taken photographs from all over the world- Paris, Rome, New York, Seoul, and along the Silk Road. The works of his 30-year career have spanned a multitude of fields: his Gekisha Series, which marked a historical change in Japan's nude gravure photography, Ie (The House), Shoku (Food), and Ichizoku (Families), all of which cut deeply into the heart of Japanese culture. His activities can be seen as a symbol of contemporary Japanese culture.

Shinoyama, who seems to have captured the whole world behind his lens, has come back again to a haunting object, the world's most mysterious city, TOKYO. In NUDE, which can be called his debut work, he placed female figures in the middle of the Tokyo scenery. After that, however, he stopped taking photos of the city. What took the lid off this 20-year hiatus was the city's unprecedented development and maturity. Shinoyama, as if challenging the colossal living organism TOKYO as he continued clicking his shutter, created his own original technique, cinorama, following the beating desire of the century-old city which continues to grow upward, downward and radially. And this life work of the last ten years, into which he put all his might, is completed in this work.

In the scenes of TOKYO, this Tokyo-born photographer has captured the diversity of energy latent of the world's greatest megapolis of the fin de siecle. All the features of the city, all the things that nobody has every caught before are exposed. In the eyes of this unusual photographer, the figure of the future city TOKYO appears beyond the scenes of reality.

This photo collection will be an important record of the TOKYO of the early 1990s for generation to come"

- Text from the book