Research: Wong and Nakano

Throughout the last 10 years I’ve been interested in making photographs of my hometown and surrounding areas in the dark of night. Whether it’s a street scene in the witching hour or a car park in the early evening of a dark and cold wintery night, even some star trails or Milky Way shots from the top of a local hill. I’ve always found the challenge to be exciting and something to be learnt and mastered. Something I’m a long way from doing as of yet.

Night Night

Last year whilst studying my first module of the BA Hons in Photography at the University Of Wolverhampton I found myself using a mixture of film and digital cameras in the Raven’s Meadow Multi-Storey car park in Shrewsbury town centre. Along with the daylight photos of sharp shadows entering the slatted concrete walls I found it was an enthralling place to wander around once the sun had set, and especially if it had been raining recently.

Tokyo Night

Mixing this colour film photography work with the digital module of the course I came across a photographer named Liam Wong. His book, TO:KY:00, was on the shelf in Waterstones in Birmingham city centre and I flicked through it before instantly taking it to the sales desk to purchase. The imagery in the book was something akin to the movies Blade Runner and other Cyberpunk inspired titles and I was immediately grabbed by it. The use of reflections in puddles and wet floor surfaces, the neon and fluorescent lighting as well as the signage, atmosphere and people included in the photos was exceptional. The attention to detail in this book with regards to colour grading and ensuring a consistent look and feel to the images is amazing. There are many insightful quotes too from the photographer which help to understand the mindset he was in during the making of the images.

This year, whilst studying my second module, Experimentation And Dialogues, I’ve been looking at other work, away from my “comfort zone” but I keep coming back to the same book. Also in March I placed a pre-order for his new book titled “After Dark” and it arrived in October. Again it’s an amazing book of images using striking graphic design and presentation to show off his images of cities at night.

Tokyo Day

After I’d been through the book for the first time I posted a thanks to Wong and got an answer back from him, which he has said he tries to do for anyone that emails or contacts him. He suggested that I look at the book “Tokyo Nobody” which is by a photographer named Masataka Nakano if I was interested in how Tokyo looked when captured in film photographs, as Wong himself mainly uses digital but is getting into film. As can be seen from the Instagram screenshot below.

When I couldn’t find the book in the Uni library catalogue or the local Shrewsbury library I went to ebay and ordered a new copy of Tokyo Nobody. It’s a truly amazing book showing some of the same areas of Tokyo that Wong shot at night, but in the day time with no sign of life to be seen anywhere. The photos in Nakano’s book are truly haunting and bring to mind the opening scenes of 28 Days Later in an empty London.

Humans?

The images in this book, originally published in 2000 after ten years of taking the photographs, appear to have been taken in the 2020 Pandemic and represent what we saw on the rolling news channels of cities that had been all but abandoned as workers stayed at home on furlough or were able to telecommute. It’s astounding that Nakano was able to capture some of the busiest areas of this populous city which in the nineties was home to 32 Million people. That’s five times more people than lived in London at the time and three times more than live there today. Imagine trying capture a people free scene in London and then imagine that in Tokyo. Crazy skills.

Nakano used an 8×10 Tachihara field camera with Kodak film in to capture his images for the book and some of the double page spreads show a broad image of a scene in which no people are seen and barely any vehicles. Unlike Wong’s images that show signs of human occupation of the spaces in the images, Nakano’s tend to show empty scenes.

Wong’s images contain many people, but where they do not there are usually indicators of humans existence, a photo from TO:KY:00 shows a Karaoke Bar down an alleyway with just the lights on and a lantern to tell you that there are drunk businessmen in the venue singing their hearts out. Beer bottle crates sit awaiting filling for the recycling teams to pick up. Other images show people waiting in cars, at crossings or going about their night-time business in their own little worlds. Usually Wong’s images feature a lot of rain soaked streets , cars, people with umbrellas and neon signs.

Nakano’s images on the other hand are Night & Day different (excuse the pun), there are neon signs in his images but as it’s daytime they’re turned off and as such look to have been abandoned and part of a derelict post apocalyptic scene.

Both photographers have degrees, Wong in Computer arts and Nakano in Visual Communications and look to have come to photography later in their careers. Wong is primarily a game designer and as such uses his cine-literate knowledge to guide him in his style which later morphed into a career in photography whereas Nakano has carried out multiple photography projects with this Tokyo Nobody being a ten year project that has produced an outstanding book of images.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in my earlier Instagram tweet aimed at Wong, I am inspired by both of these bodies of work and will continue to pull these books from my ever growing shelf to refer back to. The images within are very much my cup of tea and I wish that some of the images I make would come out as well as these two photographers do. I will also delve deeper into the other works by Nakano as I think they are also very apt.