What is it like photographing the darker side of Tokyo? is a question i get asked a lot in Instagram, so i wanted to write a blog post about my experience as a nighttime street photographer and what does it mean for me to capture this isolated corners of the Tokyo you don’t get to see in the mainstream media.
What’s your motive behind capturing the darker side of Tokyo.
I’ve always been fascinated by the surreality of the unknown and the mysterious, the dark matter that can’t be quantified into an absolute form, the radical agent of chaos that transforms the simple into a serpentine of randomness.
Capturing moody grungy alleyways especially in a megacity like Tokyo, it’s been a fascination of mine for few years now, there is something about the light funneling from a horizontal way feathering light into a very moody scenario that has it’s own lighting conditions by the randomness of chance.
So somewhere along those mazes of darkness comes a random human being, traversing in this lonely pathways, maybe i think too much about things but whenever i am walking into one of this dark tunnels, i can’t stop to think a resemblance to an astral projection tunnel, many people that undergo near-death experiences, speak about this dark tunnels with a light afar, perhaps the unconscious process as of why i indulge in capturing this highway of the unknown is because i am re-mapping defragmented memories of perhaps a tunnel I’ve walked before.
What do you trying to tell the viewer about this?
I guess for me, what i am trying to convey with this dark isolated images of people walking down tiny alleyways is a nostalgic emotion, loneliness, separation, but also bravery for being alone in confronting the darkness.
If you think about it, every day in waking life we are walking on some kind of road, from the bed to the bathroom, to the house to work, from work to the groceries, this roads takes us to places, we can’t escape walking on a road this is how the physical construct reshapes our conceptual truth of reality.
I was watching a documentary a few years ago about how proteins inside cells move along filaments within cells to carry information inside cells, no matter where we look at roads are embedded within all facets of reality.
This microcosmos of roads intertwine the intangible and the unimaginable, i guess until we detach ourselves from the flesh and reinvent ourselves again into indestructible energy.
