Tokyo Revisited

The exhibition is a story of images of Tokyo from the post-war period to the present day through hundreds of shots by two of the main protagonists of Japanese photography and among the most influential on the international scene.

Like stray dogs – to quote the title of one of Moriyama’s famous works, Misawa, which he himself identified as his own portrait – that roam the city looking around like nomads, the two artists take photos of all those who move in front of their eyes, without looking for beauty but exploring and showing every corner of Tokyo. Tomatsu with a closer look at social and political issues, Moriyama, with his “grainy, blurry and unfocused” shot plunges enthusiastically into the absurd and overwhelming spectacle of consumer society.

Both united by treating photography more as a way of life than as an artistic genre. And both extraordinary exponents of that style of photography born and rooted exclusively in the urban context of Tokyo, which stands out in the global art scene as one of the most original, dynamic, and poetic expressions of art.