Yoshiyuki Okuyama windows

Between 2020 and 2022, Yoshiyuki Okuyama photographed some one hundred thousand windows across Tokyo under lockdown. This book gathers 724 of them. Working with a digital camera for the first time, Okuyama turned his lens on frosted glass — one of the city's most characteristic architectural features.

Each window offers a glimpse of the life behind it: a corner of a kitchen or bathroom, hanging laundry, figurines, flowers. Blurred and framed, these spaces resolve into abstractions that register the living going on inside.

What emerges is a portrait of Tokyo as a city of disparate structures pressed close together, perpetually in flux and endlessly remaking itself. For Okuyama, the opaque pane reflects the distance people keep from one another, and may trace its lineage to the shōji screen, which closes off a space while still admitting outside light. Moving from the window outward into architecture and culture, windows stands as a document of its moment unlike any other.

With texts by the artist, novelist Toshiyuki Horie, and architect and critic Taro Igarashi.

Published by AKAAKA in 2023
H194mm × W205mm
752 pages
Cloth hardcover
ISBN：978-4-86541-171-3