An exploration of color, form, and motion—Chromodynamics is a personal project centered around street photography in the urban expanse of Tokyo. The term ‘chromodynamics’ originates in quantum physics and refers to the interactions between the particles within protons and neutrons, known as quarks. I chose this title partly because of the meaning of the word itself: ‘chromo’ meaning color and ‘dynamics’ meaning power or motion. I also chose this name because it is a metaphor—albeit a tenuous one—connecting quantum physics and street photography: the observer effect. In physics, particularly quantum physics, the observer effect is the inability to measure a system without thereby changing it in some way. In a similar way, the act of street photography changes the system (the streets and their inhabitants). In street photography the observer is as much a part of the scene as the observed.

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When darkness falls, neon illuminates the streets and smoke permeates the air, the city takes on a dreamlike quality of revelry, mystery, alienation, and serenity. Through these images I hope to portray this nocturnal dance—the places, the people, and the wonders of the Tokyo night. Though the photographs are taken over many years, they are meant to span a single quintessential night, archetypal of all the nights that bridge the gap from dusk till dawn in the urban expanse of Tokyo.

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Contrails against a painted sky, crows circling urban spires, rooftops cast in neon glow.... Vaporized Memories is a series of images evoking nostalgia for a time that never was. The sun sets on the techno-utopia of the past—a future path no longer visible from our present, only existing in our memories, ephemeral like water vapor in the air.

This body of work arises from an uncanny sense that the future we are living in now is not the future from our collective dreams of decades past. There was a time when our visions of the future were infused with optimism, and we longed for technology to deliver us from economic inequality and ecological ruin. But those dreams have not become reality, and now instead of optimism, the future evokes fear and ennui. And amidst our present we find the ruins of a future that exists only in the collecting memory of civilization: in media and in the imagination.

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I find myself on the rooftops over Ikebukuro one summer night in the Tokyo metropolis. The streets hum fifteen stories below my feet, rooftop machinery whines around me. A starless, light-polluted slate gray sky hangs low above my eyes, seemingly so close as though I could reach out and touch it. In this moment I feel serenity amidst the chaos of the city. A love affair with Tokyo’s rooftops swells within me and lulls me back again and again after that first foray into the hidden vertical dimension of the metropolis. That first enchantment was the seed for my deep love of urban exploration, particularly above the streets. The open spaces on the rooftops—the voids—entice and intoxicate me. This is the call of the of the void, or ‘L’appel du Vide.’ It is what draws me up and leads me to capture the visual impact of those highest reaches of the urban expanse.

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A collection of quintessential moments in Japanese modern life, 'Life, Japan’ is my take on the Japanese day-to-day. Taking place primarily in the urban centers of Tokyo and Kyoto, the series nonetheless attempts to convey a view of Japanese life that is in a sense universal, sometimes bordering on the cliché. By my own admission this view of tradition and modernity in Japan is a romanticized western view, and so the title of the series takes on an almost ironic sense—as though geisha and sumo wrestlers were all there is to ‘Life, Japan.’

This work may belie the complex interplay of traditional culture and the rapid modernization that has consumed Japan in the last 50 years. However, I attempt to give a sense of the somewhat absurd juxtaposition of suit-wearing salarymen, kimono-clad women, moustachioed hipsters, and all the various chefs, postmen, monks, taxi drivers, and oddballs going about their daily lives in a serene techno-utopia. One can dream.

A personal art portrait series about a girl in a neo-noir cyberpunk world. The purpose of this project is to explore the use of LEDs to add vivid color to the streets of Tokyo, and tell an imagined tale of a journey through a nocturnal metropolis. The model is @suzuwanders

Over the years, I have regularly visited a particular koi pond in Harajuku, tucked away in a garden not far from the crowded shopping streets. I’ve gotten hooked on photographing the koi, particularly in spring when fallen cherry blossom petals carpet the surface of the water. Over time, the visual style of the images evolved into something more and more reductionist and abstract—only the fish on a black field dotted with white blossoms—almost as if the koi are swimming in space.

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Looking up from the narrow crevasses that snake their way through the back streets of Tokyo’s major boroughs, one sees a tiny sliver of sky—bright sunlight filtering down to the depths of the city much as it would fall to the understory of a jungle. Here in the bowels of the city, life is scarce as on the floor of a tropical rainforest, limited to cockroaches and rats. Humans only venture to these depths to dispose of trash or to take smoke breaks. The walls close in on those who explore these narrow corridors behind the glimmering façades of the Tokyo metropolis, evoking a distinct claustrophobia and a yearning for the light glimmering down from the rooftops ten floors above.

During my years of exploring the metropolis, I gradually realized that cities are as much organic as they are artificial. This quality of the city can be easily seen from the air—the whole city spreads its tendrils out into the earth like a fungus. Urban nodes arise, connected by arteries and nerves. It grows without a single, central mind commanding the entire organism—it has no need for that, as it follows the natural laws of thermodynamics. However, I find it more fascinating on the small scale—the city littered with growth upon growth, accumulating in layers. Buildings are entangled in sprawling wires, pipes, conduits, themselves covered in foliage or layers of graffiti amidst a forest of buildings, falling and rising like trees in a concrete forest.

This series of photos conveys the small-scale specimens of organic growth in the urban expanse. Wires, pipes, signs, poles, paint, plants, and machinery are all examples of what I call ‘Urban Organics.’

This collection is a subset of my ‘Urban Organics’ but it deserves its own gallery due to the sheer number of specimens in my collection. The utility poles of Tokyo take on many forms, reminiscent of some kind of primordial animal in the deep sea of the early earth. They share a common morphology which is diversified into an endless variety of phenotypes. I enjoy capturing these stationary beasts in environs that suit their individual characters.

Over the last decade Halloween has become a new and unofficial festival in Tokyo. During the last few days of October, thousands upon thousands of costumed revelers make their way to the various nightlife and party districts of Tokyo—the most popular of which is Shibuya. The festivities have swelled to the point that police presence is necessary to keep in check the crowds of ghouls, pop culture references, and scantily clad women.

This series of photographs is an ongoing project, beginning during the Halloween of 2016. My aim is to capture the raw debauchery, insobriety, and raucous behavior—and the police response to it all—taking place on the nights preceding and culminating in Halloween each year in the streets of Shibuya.

A collection of images capturing the motion and chaos of the Tokyo metropolis. The traffic and the flying highways and overpasses of the urban infrastructure conspire to perform a ballet of light and motion. The images are meant to evoke a sense of movement of the camera in addition to the flux of the subjects portrayed in the images. Nothing is static in the Tokyo metropolis.

The Japanese metropolis is vast. Whether it’s Tokyo or Osaka, the city is filled with skyscrapers towering over the streets. The architectural design of Japanese cities leads to many buildings exuding a cold and monolithic mood. And yet, among these imposing structures are the human inhabitants of the city. They are small and insignificant compared to their environment. Their human form stands in stark contrast against the impersonal geometry of the urban expanse.

The city captured in one image over a span of time—Quantum States is meant to portray the ephemeral and intangible essence of the city at night. The urban expanse is a superposition of all its structures, inhabitants, and vehicles at any one moment in time. The urban lights stretch to create a simulacrum of a wave function, a mere impression of the reality of the metropolis. The impression can be spherical, linear, orthogonal, or hyperbolic, depending on the motion of the camera.

Zipping through the Japanese countryside without the slightest vibration, one can’t help but marvel at the Japanese bullet train—sleek, efficient, always on time. But what is gained—convenience and mobility—must be paid for with the loss of something else, something intangible. Gradually, the spaces between the major ports of call for the bullet trains become a no man’s land, a non-space for the traveler, mere filler, the obstacle that must be begrudgingly traversed to get to the good stuff.

Sitting on the train, moving along at 270 kilometers per hour through verdant countryside, rice-paddy-filled valleys, and tunnels hewn through mountains, I contemplated this notion, and so this project, titled 270KPH, was born. It is a meditation on experiencing the transience of the great swaths of land, both rural and urban, lying largely ignored along the main arteries of the Japanese bullet train.

Human cities are living, breathing organisms. They grow, evolve, and shed their skins. Urban Skin is a project attempting to capture the accumulated layers of urban organic life on the surfaces of the city. Over time, small effects—graffiti, stickers, weathering, erosion, abrasion, and even shadows and light—build up on the buildings and objects strewn about the metropolis. This is the city’s skin. The skin is ever-changing, being shed and replenished over time, just like real skin. As this process continues, unique tableaus sprout up around the urban expanse and they are each in themselves works of art. These scenes are the subjects of the Urban Skin project.

Some projects are born out of an obsession with a specific subject or concept. In this case, it was a gradually brewing interest in the forms of bicycles. Bicycles for the most part have geometries that can boiled down to a few simple shapes—two triangles, two circles, with some doodads attached here and there. Bicycles also exist in a nearly infinite variety of colors. These two visual traits, their common morphology and chromatic diversity—as well as their ubiquity—led me down a rabbit hole of visual exploration. Over time, I also came to notice that some bicycles end up parked in environments that sympathize with the character of the bike, whether that be visually or in a narrative sense. My interested grew into an obsession as time went on and I couldn’t stop photographing bicycles, of which there is no shortage in Tokyo, no matter where I went. These images are the fruits of this obsession.

Whenever I find myself in nature I am taken in by its magical atmosphere. Spending most of my time photographing the city and its environs and inhabitants, this may seem like a leap into an unfamiliar subject matter. However, in all my work I tend to capture the atmosphere, color, quality of light, and mood first and foremost, while the actual subject becomes almost secondary. I tend to apply this same sensibility to any subject, in the city or otherwise.

And so, on this particular day, I found myself in a hillside grove of ‘mitsumata,’ a yellow flower found commonly around Japan. Spending a few hours exploring the grove, I was able to create an intimate portrait of the flowers and the forest in which they live.

Plants constitute the bulk of the biomass on earth, and of them trees are the most massive. It can be argued that in that sense, trees are the dominant lifeform on this planet. They comprise forests, but they also inhabit human spaces, such as cities. Over the years I have encountered many trees, as most people have. Trees fascinate me both as living creatures and living sculptures, so much so that I formed a habit of photographing them, highlighting their sometimes odd geometries, and juxtaposing them against man-made structures, artificial lighting, and so on.

I began doing street photography in Tokyo in 2010, and for the next few years I developed a particular style and subject matter in my street photography. In these early days, I was not very conscious of my creative direction. I had some inspiration from my peers, my own interests, and my eye to guide me. In this way I wandered the city and photographed, and photographed, and photographed some more.

Over time, and by sharing my work online, I began hearing feedback. The common theme I heard was that my work was ‘cinematic.’ It is true that I take much inspiration from cinema, but I did not make a conscious effort in those days to emulate it. It must have been subconscious. Or it may have been simply the kind words of strangers on the internet.

Now, nearly a decade on, I have spent some time going through these old photos. I see a lot of flaws in these pictures, and in many ways, I have departed from this style of shooting, having moved on to a more refined look. However, I do recognize a kind of consistency in them. As a collection, these photos of Tokyo serve as a touchstone for me to my photographic roots. I am proud of my early self for the legwork and time I put in. Without these images, taken from 2010 to 2013, I would not be where I am today. They are a part of my story.