Mika Ninagawa - Tokyo

2020, First Edition, KAWADE SHOBO SHINSA, Japan

"Mika Ninagawa's TOKYO takes place in a Japanese family album of books about the city that already contains some of the great photographs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If today we think of Tokyo through the lens, it is an intense and vital visual world in which acknowledged masters like Araki and Moriyama run into up against the generations of photographers that they inspired, but which they now also, increasingly perhaps, as technologies evolve, share with film-makers. Ninagawa inhabits both worlds, photography, and cinema, and in each, she usually prefers to create and reproduce her own distinct version, or vision, of reality." - An excerpt by Simon Baker, Director of MEP Paris, as his closing words of TOKYO by Mika Ninagawa.

Mika Ninagawa is a Japanese photographer and film director. She is well known for her brightly colored photographs of flowers, goldfish, and landscapes. Though in TOKYO, she focuses on the beauty of the city being everything and anything at once, all of the time. Celebrity and family life; work and play; pleasure and confusion; night and day; beauty and banality; high-fashion and old-fashioned; karaoke and sakura. TOKYO showcases a glimpse of when COVID-19 began affecting the world, as well as the decision making of 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. A book full of raw images of life in the busy city, mixed with contradicting points that are displayed beautifully by Ninagawa.