shashasha

Split into two chapters, Yusuke Hanazaki’s photobook debut “City Lights” presents street photography shot in Tokyo (chapter 1) and Osaka (chapter 2) between 2013 and 2017.
Hanazaki’s style of documenting the streets is a peculiar hybrid – neither too interested in architecture, trends or ‘one-in-a-million’ scenes, his photographs create a well-coordinated picture of each city’s streetscapes, with something interesting to discover in each single shot.
In his afterword, Gallery Niepce director Takehiko Nakafuji compares Hanazaki’s style to the ‘con-pora’ movement of the early 1970s.

“In Hanazaki’s photos of city life, we can get a clear view of both the everyday scenery of the townscape where nothing special is happening and the figures of the people existing indifferently in the light […]
Just as the earlier conpora photography has become more deeply appreciated over time, we can be certain that within a few decades at most this debut photobook of Hanazaki’s will be highly appreciated as a work that encapsulates the nihility and light drifting through Japan’s two largest and totally different cities of Tokyo and Osaka at the end of the Heisei era.”