Massive Discount Tokyo Mk Taxi Taxi, Shinbashi District, Dated 1988. Gift Boxed [gKlqCV3N]

Vintage print from an edition of 10 hand printed by the artist between 2004 and 2010.

Paper size: 23.6 x 16.5 inches / 60 x 42 cms. 
Initialled, dated, annotated & numbered (recto)

view the entire Tokyo Taxi collection on the artists Distil Ennui website.

Provenance:

Book publication 'Tokyo Taxi' by Merrell, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-8589-4569-9.
Exhibition 'Tokyo Taxi' 2011, Ann330 Gallery, Los Angeles.

Sold direct from the artists studio, recorded in Catalogue Raisonné.

BACKGROUND NOTES 

From the late 1980’s to 2011, I documented the hundreds of differing taxi firms operating in the city of Tokyo, each with its own distinctive illuminated brand signage.

Some of these taxi firms had as few as just two licensed cars on the road, making the task of cataloguing them very difficult. Today these illuminated designs are all but a memory, as the four big companies buy out the smaller ones for their operators licence. Now most of these companies and their unique lights have disappeared into the big firms standard design.

This collection of works illustrate my fascination with the energy of Tokyo taxis at night: they glow with a sense of urgency in the business of someone’s journey playing out. The way the landscape of the city interacts with the reflective surfaces of the taxi is often overlooked. These works capture that light play, with the energy and bustle of city life contrasting the stillness of the individual sat within it.

All photographed on a Hasselblad 6x6cm camera loaded with transparency film, shot handheld from the saddle of a push bike as I hunted around the city looking for the rarest of company designs. As with all my work, they are presented here for you ‘as shot’ without the use of any post production, digital or traditional. 

A collection of these works were published in a book titled 'Tokyo Taxi' in March 2012 by Merrell Publishers, with 200 colour illustrations across 224 pages. ISBN: 978-1-8589-4569-9.