Documentary Photography

JAPAN. Tokyo. 2007. I came to Tokyo for the first time in the spring of 2006. My girlfriend Sara had got a job there, and so I decided to move with her to explore the city in which she had grow up. It was a society I had never experienced before, one of which I had little knowledge and to which I had no real sense of relationship. Initially I felt invisible. Each day I would walk the streets without anyone making eye-contact with me. Everyone seemed to be heading somewhere, it was as they had no need of communication. Most mornings I would take the Chuo-line from Nakano to Shinjuko, and even though the train would be packed with salary-men and school girls in uniform, I rarely heard a word being spoken. Though Tokyo and its people seemed unreachable, I felt drawn to the tight and confined reality of the metropolis. My feeling of isolation and loneliness was overwhelming; it was something I had to find a way to change. And so I began taking my pocket camera out with me on the streets and in the parks. Rather than focusing on the impressively tall buildings and the eternal swarm of people , I began searching for the narrow paths and the individual human presence in the city that felt both attractive and repulsive at the same time. I wanted to meet the people , to get involved in the city, to make Tokyo mine.

I selected this image because at first I thought it was a photo of a bunch of smiling masks. It was only after seeing the full-size image that I realized that they probably weren’t masks and might be fishing buoys, or fish, or seals, or torpedoes, who knows! The title provided is of more of a description of the photographer’s collection than of the individual photo. Documentary photography is a recording of the truth of major and minor human events, often trying to evoke emotion and tell a story. Without context the viewer is left wondering what is going on. They fell left out because they don’t know why the picture was taken and what story the photographer was trying to tell.