Tokyo’s many faces – as seen by Magnum Photographers

One of Bruno Barbey’s photographs from the 1950s shows a man with no legs playing music in Tokyo Station. I’m told that back then, seeing soldiers who had returned from the war having lost arms or legs was a common sight; the photo shows us this time when the scars of the war were still very fresh in Tokyo.

Barbey said it is interesting to shoot at stations because you can observe the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, the photos in the exhibition present very ordinary fragments of memories in the city, making you feel as though you have lived them yourself. In René Burri’s Tokyo 1961, which shows two Japanese lovers on a train listening to a radio, audiences can feel the affection, tenderness, sweetness and nostalgia of the moment; through the photographer’s eyes, mind and heart audiences can re-visit the moment.

I was particularly fascinated with Antoine d’Agata’s schizophrenic Tokyo, in which he has presented a series of chaotic images of this illusional city, a realistic capturing of the city’s dark side. The collages of raw images of blood, human bodies and strangers’ faces, dark red and black colors are presented with smell of sex, danger and violence. He follows the shadowy goings-on of Kabukicho and creates hypnotic images that entrap you in their horror. His observation of contemporary Tokyo – its technology, fast pace, isolation, corruption and cold human relations – struck a chord with my experience of the city. From time to time, Tokyo reveals its violent face, overwhelming people with its speed, drowning them in its material affluence and tempting them with the poison of its beautiful fads.