Chotoku Tanaka "Today Tokyo"
Zen Foto Gallery is pleased to present “Today Tokyo” from Thursday, April 28 to Saturday, May 28. This is Chotoku Tanaka’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, organized to celebrate the publication of the photobook under the same title, and this is the second book Zen Foto has published with Tanaka, after “Panoramic Photography — Europe 1975” in 2020. Tanaka, who received his first SLR camera when he was in elementary school, found Tokyo as a captivating subject to photograph around the 1960s and 1970s. It was exactly when a series of epoch-making events were happening in the city during the rapid economic growth in Japan. Since then, Tanaka continued to nimbly capture the streets of Tokyo with its contrast of light and shadow as well as ordinary and extraordinary life with his unique perspective. This exhibition features a selection of 30 photos from his early work included in the photobook.
“It wasn’t until the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 that I came to appreciate Tokyo as a theme. 1964 was the year when Tokyo was first recognized not as the capital of a defeated country, but as a dynamic city in the Far East. (…)
That was when I picked up my Nikon and Leica cameras and began taking photographs of Tokyo. The photographs in this book were selected from the very early part of my 50-year photographic career, taken in the 1960s and the early 1970s.” —Chotoku Tanaka
