Tokyo Metro, photograph / digital print, 100x150 cm
Tokyo metro is a place as much inspiring as full of contradictions. To understand this phenomenon, you simply have to be there. And it is not just about too many human beings gathered in a confined space. In such a large population, individuality is demonstrated through appearance defined by clothes. The manga culture enforces specific style and the reception of this bizarre fashion astonishes the average European. The need to emphasize one’s identity is reduced to the exaggerated artificiality of short skirts, provocative stockings, dyed hair, heavy makeup and feet pointing inward. Of course, this regards the women; still, copying this model hardly gives them the desired individuality.
Modern forms of image recording effectively elude objective truth. Through some manipulations, a digital picture can gain or lose its meaning, and its iconic value should be treated with reserve, like all modern art. Manipulating a photographic record can take a variety of forms, the essence of such treatment being a specific reflection provoked in the viewer as intended by the author.
In the whole Tokyo Metro cycle, the people in the photographs have never met nor has the actual events ever occured. Thus, a specific time-space, filled with people, becomes part of a depicted situation that remains just a pure projection of human imagination, provoking contact that never happened, with the medium of photography „making it real†– as little or as much as that.