Description
Tokyo Midnight explores the Asian megalopolis, and the ways Tokyo comes to life between dusk and dawn in a futuristic neonscape, a time when the natural light disappears, and the artificial light takes over.
The images were photographed by Kip Scott in early 2019 and early 2020 (just before the Covid 19 pandemic exploded), the year the original Blade Runner film was set, and as such interrogate the commercial nature of urban utopias while celebrating the technical and creative sophistication of the East, as to opposed to the rapidly diminishing global dominance of the West.
The beguiling photographs are accompanied by a moving essay on her home town Tokyo by Katherine Tamiko Arguile, author of The Things She Owned and Meshi, published by Affirm.
‘Life passes and buildings decay; nothing stays the same. Kip Scott’s portrait of my vibrant home city at night illuminates these liminal moments and spaces, corners of the city on the cusp of change. His images hint at the ura that lies the other side of the omote, encapsulating the entire glorious vastness of the city, with its beauty and its ugliness, its dark and its light, a place that seems forever on the cusp of day and night.’ Katherine Tamiko Arguile, author of Meshi: A personal history of Japanese food
