Alan Thomas

Japanese Urban Landscape
Beyond the entertainment districts, the pachinko parlors, and the crowded department stores, Japanese cities are uncannily silent. Walking through their stillness, one begins to discern the peculiar geometries of urban Japan. These photographs take the measure of Japan’s spaces where they are most easily overlooked: the architecture of its backstreets, the layered density of neighborhoods, the ephemeral effects of constant building and rebuilding. I have photographed in Japan since the mid-1980s, but it was not until a third extended visit, in 1997, that I began to recognize a visual logic in Japan’s ordinary city spaces. These landscapes are a set of formal solutions to the problem of a traveler’s disorientation, solutions drawn from the everyday structures of cities.

Chicago Self-Park
These photographs are about the form and evolution of a great city as seen from one its least-remarked structures: the self-park garage.

Self-park garages mirror the native geometry of Chicago with something like a vernacular prairie style. Their ramps slant across horizontal apertures through which the city organizes itself in ways drivers are usually too hurried to notice. Their roofs—accessible by elevator to any pedestrian with a few minutes to spare—are the secret, democratic skydecks of Chicago. At the same time, these garages are the bane of preservationists: for years they have pushed aside old tenements and row houses while serving a particular vision of Chicago's future.

The Chicago Self Park series grows out of a recent urban landscape project in the cities of Japan. In the course of my explorations there, I became interested in how automobiles inhabit and transform our spaces. People throughout the world make extraordinary accommodations for their private vehicles. How we fit automobiles into our structures and routines says a great deal about us as individuals and as a society.

If Chicago Self-Park shares a theme with my other work, it is an attention to the ways that landscape shapes our sense of the past, present, and future.

Japanese Urban Landscape images are available 11 x 17" as archival
inkjet prints for $300 and 16 x 24" as silver gelatin prints for $1200. There are a few exceptions.
Nakahashi Katshuhige's FUJI, Kyoto (1997) and Insecticide, Tokyo (1998)
are available as 11 x 17" archival inkjet prints only. Tokyo (1986) is available
as a 15 x 15" archival inkjet print.

Chicago Self Park images are available 12 x 18" (or 12 x 15") and 16 x 24" (or 19 x 24")
as archival inkjet prints in editions of 20 for $400 and $750, respectively.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.