Xavier Comas’s black and white photography series, Tokyo Up, Down, seeks to explore the “basic paradox of personal alienation in urban living: the inescapable physical proximity countered by emotional distance” (Comas). His series, available in the online version of Lens Culture: Photography and Shared Territories, captures the strangers of Tokyo’s upscale business skyscrapers as well as those in the Red Light District as they take their short rides up and down in the elevators. Comas looks for the “subtle interactions between strangers on the shortest ever journey” (Comas). Some of his images are composites, showing a lonely figure against the sharp Tokyo metropolis. Others bring to life that uncomfortable, too close feeling we can get in a crowded elevator or dark building. Visually, the images are strikingly contrasted and eloquently composed—despite their voyeuristic style.
Lens Culture link
For some reason, when I copy and pasted out of word, the last little part didn't make it into the post. Here it is.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of material culture, Tokyo Up, Down has much to say about its contemporary society. In contrast to ancient Egypt where there was a seemingly close sense of community, today's metropolis forces us together yet makes it all too easy to be invisible.
These images are beautiful. I love the last part you added; it is true and ironic that we could be so close and yet so isolated, even within a semblance of a "community". Yes, we are close... but there are just so many of us that it becomes difficult to find "one" in a conglomerate mass of millions. If artwork had as strong a role in ancient times as it does today as simply a mode of expression, I wonder what the ancient Egyptians would have had to say about their places in community, if they experienced any similar feelings of isolation within their communities, and why they did or did not while we do.
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