Dominic Teagle‘s “Suburban East Tokyo” zine documents the Edogawa district of Tokyo, a not-yet-gentrified part of the sprawling metropolis. I don’t know much about Tokyo, but this area looks like every other suburb of a large, sprawling city I’ve ever seen, a humble, working class melange of homes and small businesses—Teagle refers to them as “lacunae in the fabric of the megacity”—and it’s clear that some developer or city planner is likely drooling over the prospect of opening up this area to development.
I’m sympathetic to this project: much of the suburban sprawl that I grew up in has now been supplanted by larger, more orderly, tidy, corporate sprawl, such that I get lost almost every time I try to visit, and I wish I had some more tangible proof of what the place was like. I’m not sure Teagle feels this way about Edogawa, but the images in the zine suggest a familiarity, an intimacy even, with the district.
The zine itself is a simple folio, well printed, inexpensive, and comes in a little slip/wrap with a print. Altogether, it’s a nice little package, for not much. The photographs are mostly urban landscapes, architectural studies, storefronts and the like in black & white, and, thankfully, there’s no information on films or cameras or anything to distract from the photographs or their presentation.
Unrated.
You can pick up a copy from Teagle’s Big Cartel page, while they last. I have 1 of the 50 unnumbered copies, so who knows how many there are remaining, but some. Why not pick one up and support a (fellow) photographer/zine maker?
