Contact Sheet: Tokyo Geometry
Within the chaos of the urban environment there is this place where light and line come together to accentuate the geometry and simplify the disarray of the city into a graphic, geometric frame. In any new city I'm looking to capture those moments and I knew when I planned my trip to Japan that Tokyo would present the opportunity for this type of urban, geometric, street photography.
But Tokyo is huge, and bold, and busy, and has this frenetic energy, and I knew that distilling that energy into the simple, graphic geometry I was looking for was going to be a challenge. I'm fairly certain the population of my town is less than that of a in a single train station in Tokyo at rush hour, so I knew my biggest personal challenge was going to be pushing through the visual noise. I also know that in a city as geographically sprawling as Tokyo, knowing where to photograph with the limited time I had was going to pose its own challenges. So when a friend of mine suggested that I reach out to Laurence Bouchard, a photographer that not only lives in Tokyo and has photographed some of the most incredible street images I have ever seen, but offers street photography workshops as well, I knew I had to set aside time to photograph with him.
We often think of photography as a solo "sport" and it can be, but if we hold that too tightly it can rob of us the opportunity to learn how other people work. Photographing with Laurance provided more than a "tour guide" to some of the most interesting architecture in Tokyo, it gave me the opportunity to talk with him and learn about how he approaches a city as dynamic as Tokyo and walks away with the bold, simple images he is known for. Not all of the images below are from the half day workshop I did with Laurence, but that workshop influenced all of them.
