Gerry Johansson - Tokyo

Tokyo is a visual journey through a city at once futuristic and obsolete, its visionary design worn out – like that of a past era. Johanasson uses photography to index the city, finding form and pragmatic order through accumulation and sequence, revealing the city's hidden, modular logic: lego-like segments, a basic square unit repeated indefinitely and in various sizes. These images are unpeopled, showing only the architecture of the city, a container of 13 million people, organised around mass movement and the funnelling of human traffic. Between the concrete, glass and steel, the occasional green life sprouts – miniature gardens in the narrow alleyways, or a cluster of flower pots lining the sidewalk. The architecture creates its own topography, and the city is glimpsed as the last outpost of a fading, mechanised world.

Born 1945, in Örebro, Sweden, Gerry Johansson now lives and works in Höganäs, in south Sweden. He developed an interest in photography during his teen years and moved to New York in the early 1960s. He later studied graphic design at Konstindustriskolan (today the School of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg), working in graphic design for fifteen years. Since the mid-1980s he has worked as a freelance photographer. His first solo exhibition was at the Fotografiska Museet at the Moderna Museet, 1982. Previous publications include a series of geographically focused publications, Amerika(1998), Sverige (2005), Kvidinge (2007), Ulan Bator (2009), Pontiac, (MACK, 2011) and Deutschland (MACK, 2012)

Other ISBN-numbers for this book: 9781910164358, 978919763266x 9783981688580