The 8 x 10 monochrome prints on show at Tokyo's UNAC Salon are hardly eye-poppers, overt only in the sharp, downward angles which drag your eyes to the ground.

Image from Tokio Ito's "Fragment"

"Interesting things are always found on the ground," photographer Tokio Ito says. His lens hunts for traces of life in New York's East Village: multiple stains on a stretch of sidewalk, garbage dumped on a street corner, bagel stands in the morning light.

Ito doesn't prize peculiarity. He photographs "things that everybody knows."

He likes to work manually and considers himself lucky if he completes 100 photos a year. From his cherished trove of work from his decade in New York (1985 to 1996), he selected fewer than 90 pictures, to be bound in three books as "Fragment."

American photographer Robert Frank has long been the object of Ito's admiration and inspiration.

Ito believes that Frank knew how to "elicit the essence of objects."

Although he was often tempted to knock on the door of the venerable photographer, who is also based in New York, Ito waited. Saying to himself, "Tomorrow, I will be able to show him better work," he waited 10 whole years. In 1996, he finally handed Frank just one image from "Fragment" -- and caught his master's eye.

That encounter brought Ito the honor of this year's Andrea Frank Award -- named after Frank's deceased daughter and given to encourage promising artists.

"I'm very happy that my work was recognized," Ito says about winning the prize. "I would have given that a one in 30 probability." (Mariko Kawaguchi)