Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression

German Photographer Michael Wolf was best known for capturing the hyper-density of cities; his images of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Chicago feature tightly packed architecture, teetering tower blocks, and bodies compressed together. Born in Munich in 1954, he spent a large portion of his career working as a photo-journalist, before becoming disillusioned with the magazine industry and focusing on fine art photo projects instead, from 2003 until his death in 2019.

Characterised by close-ups, or a lack of horizon or framing landscape, infrastructure and architecture become abstracted to the point of pure patterns of repetition. One of his best-known series, however, Tokyo Compression, from 2010, instead uses people to illustrate this same notion of density.

Absurdity of the quotidian

The series Tokyo Compression documents the experience of rush-hour commuting in the Tokyo subway with photos of suited travellers, blank faced and tired, noses and fingertips pressed up against the steamy carriage windows. The extremity of these images highlights the true absurdity of a number of our quotidian experiences.

The project was developed over a four-year period at Shimo-Kitazawa station in Tokyo, with the photographer experimenting with different forms of cropping and framing in order to best reproduce such feelings of suffocation. The project poses serious questions about standards of living in urban centres that feel eerily portentous in a post-pandemic world. The book Tokyo Compression is available in three formats, Tokyo Compression, Tokyo Compression Revisited, and Tokyo Compression Three.

Tokyo Compression (2010), a book by Michael Wolf with an essay by Christian Schüle, released by Peperoni Books.