Tatsuo Suzuki and the Siren of the East

Tokyo: the siren of the East.

Sometimes cruel, sometimes seductive: it's difficult to capture the beauty of a city that devours your soul, both positively and negatively. However, Tatsuo Suzuki succeeds. Class of 1965, armed with a Fuji X100F.

Tatsuo Suzuki

The photographer lives and works in Tokyo, beginning his career in 2008. He has won numerous international awards, including The Fence (Street category, 2017), The Independent Photographer Competition (2017), and the Steidl Book Award Japan (2016). Apart from a year at photography school, Suzuki is entirely self-taught, preferring intuition and subjectivity over technical accuracy. Combining dynamic snapshots of daily life with "up-close" portraits captured on the streets, his practice articulates his distinct vision of the city: its unique complexities, idiosyncrasies, and spirit. Expressive, atmospheric, and utterly captivating, Suzuki's moments are unmistakably the works of a Japanese inhabitant, evocations of the distinct visual language shaped by the oriental aesthetic of a bustling city, deeply melancholic yet inherently childish and romantic. Its visuals are instantaneous, but by cutting them into a picture, they become universal and eternal. The subjects of his photos are many and different from each other: young, old, and people on the streets, in the subway, waiting for public transport. It's a mix of frenetic energy and weariness, surrounded by a particular attention to the element of technology and transportation: in many photographs, people are engrossed in their phones or framed within train carriages. His street photography style expresses his feelings, as it should. Tatsuo's photography goal is to narrate how beautiful, interesting, wonderful, and sometimes cruel the world can be. "The beauty of street photography lies in capturing an image that I can't even imagine. I tend to release the shutter when my senses synchronize with the scene in the city. It's mainly a matter of sensory perception," he said in an interview.

Tatsuo Suzuki

Claustrophobic framing, attention to physiognomy, long exposures, and black and white: Suzuki's photography is a dreamcore work that deliberately seeks to escape from the sugar-coated reality and show its raw innards. The monochromatic images are distinguished by their essentiality and the ability to evoke deep emotions, and all these characteristics combined make the imagination fly.