In his text accompanying this portfolio of photographs of Tokyo, architect Arata Isozaki writes of the difficulty of deciphering this city. Paris was finally properly read, he says, by Walter Benjamin and New York by Rem Koolhaas. This was accomplished when the authors abandoned academic means and insisted upon appearances.
Isozaki finds that Benjamin, the strolling flaneur, claimed the nameless small streets, and Koolhaas asserted the role of anonymous desire (Coney Island, Radio City) and consequently deciphered their respective cities.
Tokyo has had to wait for its unraveler, but it has now found an explicator -- not a writer, but a photographer. By scrupulously insisting upon anonymous surface as revelatory, Osamu Kanemura has, believes Isozaki, shown us the city as it is.
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