Brooke Whatnall

A woman on a bicycle threading between a city bus and a row of vending machines. Two women in striped yukata walking down a restaurant street. Two men at an izakaya counter. One man on the train, reading a newspaper.

Japan in monochrome strips out the colour that usually does all the work and leaves only the geometry and the light and the people in it. The bicycle shot I keep coming back to. There is something about the compression of it, bus on one side, vending machines on the other, a gap just wide enough for a person on a bike, that feels like it describes a whole city in a single frame.

The newspaper is the other one. Everyone else on that carriage had a phone. He had a newspaper, folded in half, completely absorbed. Small act of resistance or just habit. Hard to say.

#japan #tokyo #blackandwhite #streetphotography #fujifilm