Tokyo

First edition of Tokyo by Gerry Johansson. First impression. Medium format hardback in near fine condition. Some very minor shelf wear to the front cover top edge. Signed and numbered by the artist on the title page. See photographs for reference.

About

Tokyo is a visual journey through a city at once futuristic and obsolete, its visionary design worn out – like that of a past era. Johanasson uses photography to index the city, finding form and pragmatic order through accumulation and sequence, revealing the city’s hidden, modular logic: lego-like segments, a basic square unit repeated indefinitely and in various sizes. These images are unpeopled, showing only the architecture of the city, a container of 13 million people, organised around mass movement and the funnelling of human traffic. Between the concrete, glass and steel, the occasional green life sprouts – miniature gardens in the narrow alleyways, or a cluster of flower pots lining the sidewalk. The architecture creates its own topography, and the city is glimpsed as the last outpost of a fading, mechanised world.