Tatsuo Suzuki: Friction / Tokyo Streets

L'Oeil de la Photographie

Composed of black-and-white photos taken throughout Tokyo’s bustling wards, Friction / Tokyo Street reveals unexpected meaning and beauty in the mundane, be it in an image of a girl navigating a zebra crossing, cropped legs standing on a subway platform, shifting reflections in a store window, or a pigeon caught mid-flight. Suzuki captures the spontaneous gestures, glimpses and abstractions that comprise the best street photography. Yet as the book’s title reveals, it is the conflicting and contradictory energies of the street that lie at the core of his project: “Through my own eyes...

BuzzFeed

Kate Bubacz

Instead of showing the city as a type of post-futuristic playground, Suzuki's images have a punk rock feel to them — furtive, sharp, and raw.

Frames

Scott Olsen

I cannot say what focal length Suzuki uses, but most of these are breath-close images. In a way, that makes them honest. Intimate. Present. Real. There is something—we see it all the time in the very best photography but I defy anyone to explain how this happens—in the faces of the men and women Suzuki includes that makes us wonder what they are thinking, what memory or idea prompts that look, what story we have interrupted and now want to know.

Huck

Miss Rosen

Suzuki has amassed a series of gritty scenes that capture the paradoxes of modern life