Book + Gelatin Silver Print on Baryta Paper + Special Case
Edition of 50 (select from 5 images, limited to 10 copies each)
Gelatin Silver Print on Baryta Paper (hand printed by the artist)
Paper Size: 246 × 177 mm
Image Size: 152 x 153 mm

 

Hey, listen

Last night the bugs invited me
to join them for dinner in the
deep forests of western Tokyo.
What a wonderful place!
— foreword to “Tokyo Debugger”

Shinya Arimoto’s third publication with Tokyo-based publisher Zen Foto Gallery is a deep dive into the world of bugs, critters and insects. Shot between 2010 and 2019, Arimoto travelled to the mountainous areas of Okutama and Hinohara – far away from the city but still part of Tokyo Prefecture – to capture moths, mantises, worms, spiders, snakes, frogs and other animals up close. Brilliantly, Arimoto intersperses photographs of abandoned architecture as traces of past human activity, widening the scope of his series. For Arimoto, the city of Tokyo and these mountainous areas belong to different sides of the same coin, and insects – beings that clearly belong to a different realm of nature than us – transcend the boundaries between these sides, free to move back and forth between the two. Arimoto captured another world within Tokyo, dominated by the most successful creatives on the planet, unimpressed by the ongoing sprawl of the asphalt and cement megalopolis.

Artist Profile

Shinya ARIMOTO

Born in Osaka, 1971, Arimoto currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Graduated from Visual Arts Osaka in 1994, Arimoto received the 35th Taiyo Award in 1998 with his work “Portrait of Tibet”. In 2008, he founded the Totem Pole Photo Gallery. Arimoto published “Tokyo Circulation” with Zen Foto Gallery in 2016 and won the 26th Tadahiko Hayashi Award as well as the Photographic Society of Japan’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. His other publications include “ariphoto selection” (No. 1-10, Totem Pole Photo Gallery) and “TIBET” (Zen Foto Gallery, 2019). Actively presenting his work in and out of Japan, he held a solo show at Le Plac'Art Photo, Paris in 2017 and participated in the group exhibition “Am Rand der Gesellschaft. Barlach – Springer – Arimoto” at Museum Bautzen, Germany in 2019.

Gallery Exhibitions