HND 1.1
Edition: 1/1
Dimensions: 24” × 16” image with a 0.8” white border
Details: Laser-exposed onto photo emulsion paper with a barium sulfate base, then hand-developed, fixed, and rinsed. Signed and dated on the back. Made to order with a 14-day production time. Shipped via FedEx Overnight with adult signature required upon delivery. Securely packaged between soft foam pillows in a 22” × 27” × 3” art box. Email notifications will be sent upon order receipt, production commencement, and shipment. The final shipping confirmation will include the FedEx Overnight tracking number.
Description:
A black-and-white aerial image of Tokyo, taken from the Skytree, captures a seemingly infinite sprawl of architecture, light, and labor. From this elevation, the city becomes a lattice of luminous corridors—each window a cell of motion, each glowing strip a corridor of work. It does not glow warmly; it radiates efficiency. The photograph makes visible a structure that encompasses almost the entire population: in Japan, over 90% of the workforce are wage or salaried employees. In Tokyo, that means roughly 7.8 million of 8.6 million laborers participate in routinized, commodified forms of employment (Statista; Trading Economics).
From this perspective, Tokyo reads not as a city but as an infrastructure—a machine that metabolizes labor and emits capital. Michel de Certeau distinguishes between the abstract, totalizing “view from above” and the lived experience “from below” (The Practice of Everyday Life 92). The aerial gaze dominates here. Individual subjectivities dissolve into grids of illumination, their lives compressed into data, motion, and glow.
This visual abstraction mirrors what David Harvey identifies as the spatial logic of neoliberalism. Cities are not designed for human flourishing, but for the efficient circulation of capital (A Brief History of Neoliberalism 3). Tokyo’s glowing arteries—its stacked offices, late-night trains, and flyovers—are conduits for extraction, not rest. What the image reveals through absence are the psychological and social consequences of this design: fatigue, precarity, and disposability woven into the rhythms of everyday labor.
Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity is inscribed into this view. The flexibility demanded of workers—contractual, spatial, emotional—is not anomalous, but systemic. The image captures a city in which no light ever fully turns off. Its brightness is the brightness of relentlessness. In those lights are the traces of those who wake before dawn, sit in silence on crowded trains, and answer emails in darkened apartments. They remain unseen, but indispensable.
Viewed anthropologically, the city emerges as a techno-social palimpsest where the apparatus of industrial capitalism etches itself into spatial form. This image, though absent of visible bodies, registers how labor disciplines motion, schedules, and urban space. It does not celebrate Tokyo’s modernity; it renders its cost. The city glitters—but with exhaustion. It is not an image of energy, but of containment.
To see Tokyo from this vantage is to assume the perspective of capital, of the managerial apparatus, of the state. As James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, the aerial view flattens lived realities, making complex lives “legible” but abstract (Scott 2). This photograph stages that view—not to affirm it, but to expose its consequences. It renders visible a system that obscures the very people who sustain it.
What vanishes in this perspective is the human scale: the realm of slowness, care, and resistance. What remains is a luminous geometry of labor, efficiency, and abstraction. It is not a city at rest. It is a city in motion—perpetual, faceless, and meticulously administered.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
Statista. “Labor Force in Tokyo Prefecture in Japan from 2013 to 2023.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/1330507/japan-labor-force-tokyo-prefecture/.
Trading Economics. “Japan - Wage and Salaried Workers.” Trading Economics, www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/wage-and-salaried-workers-total-percent-of-total-employed-wb-data.html.
Edition: 1/1
Dimensions: 24” × 16” image with a 0.8” white border
Details: Laser-exposed onto photo emulsion paper with a barium sulfate base, then hand-developed, fixed, and rinsed. Signed and dated on the back. Made to order with a 14-day production time. Shipped via FedEx Overnight with adult signature required upon delivery. Securely packaged between soft foam pillows in a 22” × 27” × 3” art box. Email notifications will be sent upon order receipt, production commencement, and shipment. The final shipping confirmation will include the FedEx Overnight tracking number.
Description:
A black-and-white aerial image of Tokyo, taken from the Skytree, captures a seemingly infinite sprawl of architecture, light, and labor. From this elevation, the city becomes a lattice of luminous corridors—each window a cell of motion, each glowing strip a corridor of work. It does not glow warmly; it radiates efficiency. The photograph makes visible a structure that encompasses almost the entire population: in Japan, over 90% of the workforce are wage or salaried employees. In Tokyo, that means roughly 7.8 million of 8.6 million laborers participate in routinized, commodified forms of employment (Statista; Trading Economics).
From this perspective, Tokyo reads not as a city but as an infrastructure—a machine that metabolizes labor and emits capital. Michel de Certeau distinguishes between the abstract, totalizing “view from above” and the lived experience “from below” (The Practice of Everyday Life 92). The aerial gaze dominates here. Individual subjectivities dissolve into grids of illumination, their lives compressed into data, motion, and glow.
This visual abstraction mirrors what David Harvey identifies as the spatial logic of neoliberalism. Cities are not designed for human flourishing, but for the efficient circulation of capital (A Brief History of Neoliberalism 3). Tokyo’s glowing arteries—its stacked offices, late-night trains, and flyovers—are conduits for extraction, not rest. What the image reveals through absence are the psychological and social consequences of this design: fatigue, precarity, and disposability woven into the rhythms of everyday labor.
Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity is inscribed into this view. The flexibility demanded of workers—contractual, spatial, emotional—is not anomalous, but systemic. The image captures a city in which no light ever fully turns off. Its brightness is the brightness of relentlessness. In those lights are the traces of those who wake before dawn, sit in silence on crowded trains, and answer emails in darkened apartments. They remain unseen, but indispensable.
Viewed anthropologically, the city emerges as a techno-social palimpsest where the apparatus of industrial capitalism etches itself into spatial form. This image, though absent of visible bodies, registers how labor disciplines motion, schedules, and urban space. It does not celebrate Tokyo’s modernity; it renders its cost. The city glitters—but with exhaustion. It is not an image of energy, but of containment.
To see Tokyo from this vantage is to assume the perspective of capital, of the managerial apparatus, of the state. As James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, the aerial view flattens lived realities, making complex lives “legible” but abstract (Scott 2). This photograph stages that view—not to affirm it, but to expose its consequences. It renders visible a system that obscures the very people who sustain it.
What vanishes in this perspective is the human scale: the realm of slowness, care, and resistance. What remains is a luminous geometry of labor, efficiency, and abstraction. It is not a city at rest. It is a city in motion—perpetual, faceless, and meticulously administered.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
Statista. “Labor Force in Tokyo Prefecture in Japan from 2013 to 2023.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/1330507/japan-labor-force-tokyo-prefecture/.
Trading Economics. “Japan - Wage and Salaried Workers.” Trading Economics, www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/wage-and-salaried-workers-total-percent-of-total-employed-wb-data.html.
Edition: 1/1
Dimensions: 24” × 16” image with a 0.8” white border
Details: Laser-exposed onto photo emulsion paper with a barium sulfate base, then hand-developed, fixed, and rinsed. Signed and dated on the back. Made to order with a 14-day production time. Shipped via FedEx Overnight with adult signature required upon delivery. Securely packaged between soft foam pillows in a 22” × 27” × 3” art box. Email notifications will be sent upon order receipt, production commencement, and shipment. The final shipping confirmation will include the FedEx Overnight tracking number.
Description:
A black-and-white aerial image of Tokyo, taken from the Skytree, captures a seemingly infinite sprawl of architecture, light, and labor. From this elevation, the city becomes a lattice of luminous corridors—each window a cell of motion, each glowing strip a corridor of work. It does not glow warmly; it radiates efficiency. The photograph makes visible a structure that encompasses almost the entire population: in Japan, over 90% of the workforce are wage or salaried employees. In Tokyo, that means roughly 7.8 million of 8.6 million laborers participate in routinized, commodified forms of employment (Statista; Trading Economics).
From this perspective, Tokyo reads not as a city but as an infrastructure—a machine that metabolizes labor and emits capital. Michel de Certeau distinguishes between the abstract, totalizing “view from above” and the lived experience “from below” (The Practice of Everyday Life 92). The aerial gaze dominates here. Individual subjectivities dissolve into grids of illumination, their lives compressed into data, motion, and glow.
This visual abstraction mirrors what David Harvey identifies as the spatial logic of neoliberalism. Cities are not designed for human flourishing, but for the efficient circulation of capital (A Brief History of Neoliberalism 3). Tokyo’s glowing arteries—its stacked offices, late-night trains, and flyovers—are conduits for extraction, not rest. What the image reveals through absence are the psychological and social consequences of this design: fatigue, precarity, and disposability woven into the rhythms of everyday labor.
Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity is inscribed into this view. The flexibility demanded of workers—contractual, spatial, emotional—is not anomalous, but systemic. The image captures a city in which no light ever fully turns off. Its brightness is the brightness of relentlessness. In those lights are the traces of those who wake before dawn, sit in silence on crowded trains, and answer emails in darkened apartments. They remain unseen, but indispensable.
Viewed anthropologically, the city emerges as a techno-social palimpsest where the apparatus of industrial capitalism etches itself into spatial form. This image, though absent of visible bodies, registers how labor disciplines motion, schedules, and urban space. It does not celebrate Tokyo’s modernity; it renders its cost. The city glitters—but with exhaustion. It is not an image of energy, but of containment.
To see Tokyo from this vantage is to assume the perspective of capital, of the managerial apparatus, of the state. As James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, the aerial view flattens lived realities, making complex lives “legible” but abstract (Scott 2). This photograph stages that view—not to affirm it, but to expose its consequences. It renders visible a system that obscures the very people who sustain it.
What vanishes in this perspective is the human scale: the realm of slowness, care, and resistance. What remains is a luminous geometry of labor, efficiency, and abstraction. It is not a city at rest. It is a city in motion—perpetual, faceless, and meticulously administered.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
Statista. “Labor Force in Tokyo Prefecture in Japan from 2013 to 2023.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/1330507/japan-labor-force-tokyo-prefecture/.
Trading Economics. “Japan - Wage and Salaried Workers.” Trading Economics, www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/wage-and-salaried-workers-total-percent-of-total-employed-wb-data.html.