Shinya Arimoto’s Tokyo Strut was published in 2022 by Zen Foto Gyararī, the imprint attached to the Tokyo gallery he runs, and it joins the line of city books that includes Tokyo Circulation and Tokyo Debugger. The volume’s text is in Japanese, and Arimoto is the credited photographer.
The pictures mark a shift in his working method. These are recent flash photographs, made with a Hasselblad SWC and its super-wide lens — a combination that pushes close figures and passing faces toward the edge of the frame while the rest of the street recedes into darkness and clutter. The flash does not flatter; it isolates, turning ordinary pavement encounters into something abrupt and frontal.
Set against his earlier Tibet work, where portraits came out of long contact, the Tokyo photographs read as an argument about proximity. Arimoto lives in the city, exhibits there, publishes there; the book follows from that daily nearness rather than from travel. Sequence carries as much weight as any single frame — the order in which strangers appear, and the pace at which the book moves between them.
Two things are worth noting for a collector. The work was shown in two concurrent Tokyo exhibitions around the time of publication, which places the book at the centre of a defined body of work rather than at its edge. And it was named among John Sypal’s favourite photobooks of 2023, a list that carries weight among readers who follow Japanese street photography closely. Nothing in the record suggests a scarce object; what it suggests is a considered one — a photographer, a gallery and a press working as a single operation, with the book as its most durable form.
