PETALOPLIS
future Tokyo like SF novels
photos taken in around 2100
Can't we capture the future in pictures?
Assuming that I photographed the scenery that would eventually come, I named the city PETALOPOLIS in the fiction.
When photographing areas around Tokyo, from time to time, I encounter scenes that give me a certain sense of unease. They always have a sense of ephemerality, seeming to appear and disappear in a split moment. These scenes are found in places that are experiencing remarkable change, such as the bay area around Haneda Airport and areas undergoing redevelopment around Tokyo Station, but they also seem to appear in corners of old Shotengai’s (old Japanese shopping streets) where time seems to have paused.
Last April, I was photographing Ginza which was devoid of human trace, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. As I was waiting at a traffic light at an empty Sukiyabashi intersection, I had a realization. The true nature of this unease, I thought, might be the glimpse of an urban landscape 100 years from now, or something even further. The unease was derived from the scenery presented in front of me— perhaps existing from a separate era. It may only be a glimpse for now, but this vision may eventually become the core of a future urban landscape.
During the late 1950s, multiple megacities closely linked and integrated by the development of transportation and communication networks were called a "Megalopolis". Half a century later, worlds have been even more interlinked with the spread of the Internet. The term “Megalopolis” may no longer suffice, which can be replaced by the term “Gigalopolis”, a “giga” being a 1,000 times larger than a “mega”. I consider “PEELING CITY”, the result of what I photographed for ten years from 2007-2017, to be scenes of urban landscapes focusing on the people who live in a Gigalopolis.
Last April, I was photographing Ginza which was devoid of human trace, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. As I was waiting at a traffic light at an empty Sukiyabashi intersection, I had a realization. The true nature of this unease, I thought, might be the glimpse of an urban landscape 100 years from now, or something even further. The unease was derived from the scenery presented in front of me— perhaps existing from a separate era. It may only be a glimpse for now, but this vision may eventually become the core of a future urban landscape.
During the late 1950s, multiple megacities closely linked and integrated by the development of transportation and communication networks were called a "Megalopolis". Half a century later, worlds have been even more interlinked with the spread of the Internet. The term “Megalopolis” may no longer suffice, which can be replaced by the term “Gigalopolis”, a “giga” being a 1,000 times larger than a “mega”. I consider “PEELING CITY”, the result of what I photographed for ten years from 2007-2017, to be scenes of urban landscapes focusing on the people who live in a Gigalopolis.
This work is a collection of the previously stated fragments which I found. In other words, this book is like a specimen of collected fragments of a future city yet present, and is my own version of the future image of Tokyo.
This is the representation of a city far into the future, when compared to the Gigalopolis I photographed with PEELING CITY. I call it a “Petalopolis”. The scenes in this body of work are scenes of the present, but are also scenes of the future to come.
Note: mega < giga < tera < peta are units of scale, each 1000 times larger than the previous.
Photo book "PETALOPOLS"
can purchase from here
can purchase from here
