Tokyo Diary
There is alienation among these city dwellers, a distancing from oneself as well as from others. Conformity is woven tightly into the culture, although it’s now broken up more into generational and socioeconomic subsets than it once was. Rituals are a welcome retreat, an oasis, with codes of behavior and scripts to follow. Youth, in their seeming rebellion, conform to what is just another uniform, layer upon layer of carefully curated choices.
Separated by language, custom and culture, there is virtue in being an outsider. These candid images of strangers and domestic exteriors in Tokyo in late spring of 2006 were shot at chest level with a Rolleiflex given to me by my uncle, Harry Noland. They are presentations of self and surface, with elaborate attention paid to exteriors and deliberate protection reflexively given to interiors.