Raw: Tokyo Street Graphics

RAW is a new series documenting street graphics in cities around the world. Volume one is Tokyo. Every city leaves a visual record of itself on its own surfaces. Tokyo’s is unlike anywhere else. Stickers layered over stickers, posters that outlast their purpose, signs that become accidental compositions, marks and residue that accumulate into something nobody designed but everybody sees. RAW: Tokyo is a forensic, beautiful document of that record. Shot across the city’s most visually dense neighbourhoods, it captures the tension at the heart of Tokyo’s streets: extraordinary control existing alongside extraordinary overload. Alongside the photography, five Tokyo practitioners — photographers, graffiti writers, musicians, architects, journalists, sign painters, curators, artists — write from inside this visual environment. Each the only possible choice. A foreword by a leading Japanese curator closes the volume.
The first volume in an ongoing series. Next: London.