shashasha 写々者

Tokyo’s Corona summer of 2020, documented in street photographs

Shoshi Okamoto, a disciple of Daido Moriyama and Masahisa Fukase, spent the summer of 2020 walking through Tokyo, capturing the scenes unfolding in the streets with his camera. His black-and-white images engage their human subjects from a distance, positioning them in the scenery like extras in a movie scene or like stagehands preparing a set. Viewed as a series, the somewhat melancholic yet hopeful images form a larger picture – not like pieces of a mosaic, more like disjointed memories.

“In the spring of 2020, my mother with dementia moved into a nursing home.
That summer, I put a big map of Tokyo on my living room wall and started marking the places I had visited with my camera.
One day, I saved a dying kitten in a town by a river and brought him to a hospital.
He was picked up in autumn by his newly found foster parents.
It seems that both my mother and the kitten are doing well this Christmas.”
— Shoshi Okamoto’s afterword (included in Japanese and English translation)