Michael Wolf. Tokyo Compression

About

In his series Tokyo Compression, Wolf centres on the subsurface crush of the Tokyo subway, in which thousands of commuters make their daily journeys between work and home. Photographing individuals pressed against the windows of the crowded trains during the morning rush hour, Wolf’s images are a disquieting metaphor for the conditions of city-dwellers in today’s dense urban centres.
The images for Tokyo Compression were photographed at Shimo-Kitazawa station in Tokyo over a four-year period. Over time, Wolf has engaged with the evocative potential of abstraction, cropping and reframing his images to hone in more closely on his subjects. With skin pressed against the windows, the faces of the commuters are often partially obscured, blurred from view by condensation on the glass, or shielded intentionally from others by surgical masks. Closed eyes and earphones reflect an internalised retreat from the discomfort and overcrowding, as though suspending time until the journey is over, while some passengers squeeze their eyes tightly shut as a gesture of resistance to being photographed. On other occasions, they meet Wolf’s gaze, as in the example of Tokyo Compression #18 where one closed eye creates the mirror-image of the artist, training his vision through the viewfinder.