Topic:
This series of documentary photography (can also be documentary film) reveals the cluttered yet tactically personalised interior space of the residents of Tokyo. It reflects the fact that their belongings are the mirrors of their social belonging.
Main thesis:
Tsuzuki photographed the very lived-in interiors of numerous Tokyo houses and apartments, and then jammed his piles of pictures into the format of a short-of-stature book. The result is an engrossing look at the many ways people have adapted to Tokyo’s notoriously cramped living spaces. There are several common threads–indoor clotheslines are used to supplement or replace closet space in almost every home–but each dwelling brings out its owner’s personality. Many photos simply boggle the mind with the sheer amount of stuff that can be crammed into incredibly small spaces, while others highlight the strange beauty that is often achieved in compressed living. (Excerpt from Amazon)
Methodology:
Ethnographic visual documentation of one’s flat in the various locations of Tokyo. (Primarily young Japanese, not affluent but middle classed?) The book contains little written words. Yet this book represents the hypothesis we have in the way that is easily accessible. Also Happy VIctim is another visual book we can refer to: another photographic documentation of people possessing and displaying unusual amount of garments bought from single brand inside one’s room.
Theoretical framework:
Can be related to the Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, illustrating how space can be constructed from inside (a bird house made with straws by a pigeon, for instance, is shaped by its body shape from inside)? Additionally we can draw parallel to De Certeau’s notion of Everyday Practice, or, Debord’s notion of the Spectacle.
Links:
www.culture24.org
Amazon on Tokyo Style
Amazon on Street: The Nylon Book of Global Styles
Amazon on Fruits
Wikipedia on The Society of the Spectacle
Relevance:
Relevance to B&B project is good since the work reveals the unexposed interiority of a style of a given person.