In 1996, I came to Tokyo for the first time at the invitation of the legendary publisher Robert Delpire (Robert Frank – The Americans) as part of an international exhibition project. A friendly assistant greeted me with a bundle of Japanese yen: “Welcome to Tokyo.”
Over the next three weeks, I photographed my way through the jungle of this strange but all the more fascinating world. Sumo, kimono, geisha, subway, shrine, simply everything I had known about Japanese culture up to that point.
Two years later, I found myself back in Tokyo. The country was in the midst of a never-ending economic crisis. This time, I focused on young Tokyo. A hedonistic generation that was defying the crisis, even consciously negating it. They were throwing off the shackles of tradition, expressing themselves through art and subculture, creating a new, modern, individualistic Tokyo. They were shedding the gray suits of the salarymen in favor of mohawks and Comme des Garçons. They saw themselves as the creative future of the country, taking all the influences of Western art and pop culture and transforming them into something unique and new, which in turn inspired the rest of the world. Crisis? What crisis? was the credo of young, creative Tokyo.
As a foreigner, it is easy to get lost in Tokyo’s maze of streets and buildings, traffic, and crowds. But time and again, you are overwhelmed by the surprising contrasts that reveal themselves around every corner. From the busy intersection in Shibuya, where millions of people cross in all directions every day, you can reach a lonely, hidden Shinto shrine in just a few steps or discover small fishing boats bobbing peacefully in the canal beneath the dragon-like concrete monstrosity of the city’s expressway. There are thousands of such contrasts in Tokyo, but they are often obscured by the visual flood of the modern, vibrant city. I wanted my Tokyo images to tell their story, so I searched for “space in the crowd,” “silence in the noise,” and “shadow in the light.”
Tokyo quickly evolved from an initial culture shock into a key project in my photographic work. For many years, I returned to the city in search of the people and places that make it so unique. In Fumihiro Hayashi, I soon found a true connoisseur of the city, who took me to places that remain closed to many gaijin and introduced me to remarkable people who are now good friends. The last time I saw him before he passed away was in the cinema. As Charlie, he once again guided gaijin through the wild, unknown Tokyo, but this time with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.
About Samuel Zuder
Samuel Zuder lives with his family in Hamburg. Since graduating from FH Dortmund, Department of Visual Communication, he has worked as a freelance editorial and documentary photographer for international magazines and on his own independent projects. In 2016, his photo book Face to Faith – Mount Kailash – Tibet was published by Hatje Cantz. He photographed the portrait and landscape series of the sacred Mount Kailash using an analog large-format camera. The book received the German Photo Book Prize and an award from the Art Directors Club, and it was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet – Space.
This was followed by Iran – A Thousand and One Contradictions, a collaborative book published by National Geographic Book Edition, which won the ITB Book Prize. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including Trieste Photo Days 2024, the Indian Photo Festival 2022 in Hyderabad, Portrait of Humanity 2019 at Photo London, Barcelona Foto Biennale 2018, the 1st Daegu Photo Biennale 2006 in South Korea, Born in the Sixties at C/O Berlin, Tokyo Today at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, and at several European Cultural Capitals. His photographs have been published in numerous books and catalogs, including India Now – New Visions in Photography (Thames & Hudson) and Jil Sander by Jil Sander (Prestel, 2024). He is represented by the agency laif in Cologne and is a founding member of laif genossenschaft. [Official Websiste]
