Engaging with a place.
Tokyo-polis, the title of my two photobooks, is inspired by the movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang. The 1927’s science fiction movie depicts a highly futuristic and stylized, densly populated city. The monumental architectural design of the decor contributes significantly to the movie’s atmosphere. Fritz Lang’s high contrast black-and-white pictural expressionism in Metropolis reveals a highly productive society driven by a modern spirit of scientific objectivity and efficiency. But Metropolis is also about social inegality. Life in this city takes literally place in many different layers, spatially and socially, and this at different speeds, densities and directions… An sprawling development that is layered in different forms and color schemes, a multitude of different formal languages, that then frequently overlap, or even overcrowd the pictural space. In Tokyo, nowadays this happens as much in the real than in virtual space. There is definitely « virtuality » in a place that is so efficient, punctual, and goal orientated: countless fictional caracters inhabit the city in an omnipresent parallel world. Artificial intelligence, assisting androids, placebo humanoids, superheros, robots, gigantic monsters… an endless abundance of industrial and/or entertainment avatars constitute Japanese culture – and pop culture… They materialize and sublimate real life desires, drives, threats, fears, both individual and collective…
My visit of Tokyo let me dive into a megapole with an incredibel number of inhabitants: 37.115.035 (metropolian area in 2024!) Never before I faced such a cultural megacity with such an incredibly vivid atmosphere, outstanding arts & crafts, handed over from generation to generation, very diverse and astonishing architecture, as well the old and the new. Tokyo is very busy, pluralistic and intense, it stands for omnipresent trading and production activities on a multi-million-fold basis. All this is solidly based on their love for tradition, and proud arts and crafts for decades. High technolgy, innovation, and thousand-year-old tradition meet in the Japanese consciousness and make millions citizens flow in the city’s veins seemingly without friction. Surprisingly there is everywhere also room for tranquility and recollection, even amidst a very busy underground train. This frictionlessness is rooting in a japanese cultural attitude of outmost respect for fellow citizens. A strong and conscious civility that reflects the knowledge of the importance of the One-All of a society, the Big Picture, in which everyone avoids disturbing others, almost obsessively avoiding all kind of unnecessary nuisances. Wherever you come from, you will learn (or at least rediscover) the benefits of this attitude (as I unfortunately saw: some foreigners will never…) Virtually everything connected with tradition in Japan enjoys extensive protection, but Japanese do not only conserve traditions, they also wish to develop them further. Natural building materials like wood meet high-tech construction, very often with an admirable love for simplicity of form. Precisely therefore, Tokyo is a city of strong freedom of expression, an endless, pluralistic, overwhelming production in pictural, semantical and -very important- graphical (scriptural) symbolism. So powerful, sensual, flashy and extravagant, on one hand. And then again: tranquility, simplicity, and harmony, modesty on the other. This contrast appears also in my pictures: some are very spare while others show complexity. They can be a color explosion or be reduced to basic contrasts… Photographic activity is to me purely the pleasure of these kind of moments, one by one, each a liberation of the senses from the boredom of stereotype…
Jan Rom, July 21st 2024, 2nd edition