My first friend in Tokyo was my camera. I brought it with me everywhere, with an expectation of what Tokyo “should” look like: busy, stylish, high contrast, a bit blurry here and there, and monochrome.

Jul 28, 2020 - 1 min read

Raw Japan

How I stopped shooting Japan in black and white

Community writer

Japan in my mind has not always been on 35 mm colored film. For the first few weeks, I saw Tokyo and Japan through a black-and-white lens. I was visually overloaded with everything, so monochrome photography was the easiest way out: by simplifying the colors and unprocessed details, I could focus on the gist of this aesthetically striking place... Or so I thought.

It felt incomplete, and wrong, somehow. I was leaving out colors, because there were too many shades and shapes that I couldn't process. This photo journey, along with detailed captions, was an attempt to tell the story of how I removed filters and portray Japan in her rawest state.

Was this article helpful?

Help us improve the site

By Linh Than

Community writer

My first friend in Tokyo was my camera. I brought it with me everywhere, with an expectation of what Tokyo “should” look like: busy, stylish, high contrast, a bit blurry here and there, and monochrome.

Tokyo in my mind before I arrived at the city in August, 2017 was in black and white. It might be due to the amount of B&W photos taken of Tokyo, or it might be that Tokyo was too busy, too detailed that black and white photography really did provide a soothing, therapeutic feel to fresh eyes of visitors. But something... it still felt incomplete somehow.

Of course, Tokyo "should" be simplified… at first. The amount of people, the energy, the summer heat, the lack of eye contact, the constant smoke break that inserted a light haze into the piercing light — everything, everything fascinated me in an unprecedented way and I kept taking photo after photo.

Here's a B&W photo of a somber Japanese lady waiting for her travel group on the side of a bridge at red spider lily festival in Saitama.

A Japanese middle-aged man squats down by the sidewalk and take a smoke break.

Rainy August in Tokyo -- there's nothing as poetic as a B&W photo of Tokyo train crossroads after the rain... So I thought, and this picture still provokes a lot of feelings in me, but I grew to change the lenses I viewed Japan with shortly after this "honeymoon" period.

+23

Information