JEREMIE SOUTEYRAT

Jeremie Souteyrat is a french photographer who lived in Tokyo for a decade, and currently works and lives in London, UK.

Placing Human figure in the center of his production, he published his first monograph ‘tokyo no ie’, a book about Tokyo’s contemporary houses as seen from a street life point of view.

As far as Tokyo is concerned, Westerners too often know little apart from the high-rise buildings of Shibuya and Shinjuku and the packed crowds of these commercial districts. But Tokyo is, in fact, a horizontal city, with a lower per unit density than Paris. Whole neighborhoods of single-family dwellings spread beyond the horizon. In calm lanes, and sometimes even in alleyways, each family trying to build its nest, usually on a minimal site, produces a cocoon open to the elements yet hidden from prying eyes.

 The houses shown here are designed by some of Japan’s best-known architects, sown like jewels in the immensity of Tokyo. In Japan, notions of architecture are liberal owing to the near inexistence of a legacy of buildings surviving from the past, thus better allowing architects to express their own ideas. In this way, Tokyo might be thought of as an open-air theater with its building stock affording a unique theatrical set, while its inhabitants are both actors and audience.

In this project, I wanted to document these residences by means of photography, while attempting to set them in context and explore their surroundings. In order to show the role of such buildings in the city, I’ve tried to reconcile the underlying humanity of urban photography with the rigor of the architectural image. A building is designed for living, from both within and without. Architecture gains its chief meaning from its relationship to the human inhabitant.