shashasha

In design and spirit, Takashi Homma’s “Tokyo Olympia” continues and reinterprets the artist’s 1998 work “Tokyo Suburbia.”

What kind of a place is Tokyo on the advent of the 2020 (2021) Olympic Games? How has it changed, and how does it adapt and prepare itself in expectation of the event? With such questions and themes as its bedrock, “Tokyo Olympia” attempts to grasp the nature of the megacity Tokyo. But Homma’s photography—typified by “a uniquely cool gaze that rejects any sentimentality” and its unsentimental, calm, distant air—does so not only in the more literal sense of documenting its concrete shape, its architecture, streets, and buildings, but also its atmosphere, its diversity, and its inhabitants. Shot over a period of six years from helicopters and at street level, “Tokyo Suburbia” further captures the fundamental evolution that took place in places like Shibuya, Tsukiji Market, the Bayside and the National Stadium(s).