Tokyo’s Unfamiliar Surface╱Issei Suda

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Tokyo’s Unfamiliar Surface╱Issei Suda

Masao Tanaka’s essay, with Issei Suda’s photographs of Irifune-chō and Takabashi. Asahi Camera, 1983, pp. 166–167.

In Tokyo Modern Pictorial, Issei Suda returned to the city he knew most intimately. Suda was born in Kanda, and Tokyo remained one of his central photographic subjects. His attention often settled on surfaces easily overlooked in the street: clothing, walls, signs, bridge railings, the edges of buildings, and bodies or gestures that briefly entered his field of view.

“Kyobashi (2),” published in 1983, makes this way of seeing especially clear.

Issei Suda, Tokyo Modern Pictorial: Kyobashi (2), no. 13. In front of Wako, Ginza 4-chōme.

Suda was interested in the moment when an ordinary thing, viewed from a slightly altered angle, suddenly revealed something strange. The city continues with its familiar routines, yet framing, distance, and timing make its surfaces increasingly difficult to read.

Masao Tanaka’s accompanying text gives this uncertainty a concrete form. He works through the photographs one by one, trying to establish where each was taken and following bridges and waterways back into Tokyo’s local history. For one street scene, he admits that he can identify the general area near a bridge, yet cannot tell where the bridge itself lies in relation to the photograph.

Teppōzu Inari Shrine (right) and a street near Kachidoki Bridge (left). Photographs by Issei Suda.

That difficulty of recognition comes very close to Suda’s Tokyo.

Every street has a precise location, yet the photographs weaken the security that location usually provides. Bridges, shrines, shops, and houses become shapes, textures, or patches of shadow. People rarely carry complete narratives either. Someone passes across a bridge, someone sits beside the street, another face disappears behind a body. What remains is the distance produced during a brief encounter between a person and the city.

Chiyobashi Bridge, Tsukiji. Photograph by Issei Suda.

More than forty years later, the exact coordinates matter less than the sensation Suda repeatedly returned to: a place passed every day remains familiar, then suddenly appears as though seen for the first time.

Asahi Camera
“Tokyo Modern Pictorial: Kyobashi (2)”
Issei Suda
The Asahi Shimbun Company, 1983
Text by Masao Tanaka

Read Masao Tanaka’s complete accompanying essay in Members Only, including the full English and Traditional Chinese translations.

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