Originally issued in 1979 by Asahi Sonorama, Tracks of the City is widely regarded as Shin Yanagisawa’s foundational and most influential photobook. This new edition reintroduces a body of work that has become emblematic of postwar Japanese photography, capturing Tokyo at the height of its transformation during the 1960s, when Japan was undergoing unprecedented economic expansion and large-scale urban renewal.

Produced between 1965 and 1970, the photographs chronicle a metropolis in flux, as long-standing neighborhoods were razed and replaced by modern constructions in the tide of “scrap and build” development. Yanagisawa’s images do not rely on metaphor or overt narrative; instead, their strength lies in a rigorous formalism and a restrained gaze, through which the evolving topographies of Tokyo are observed with precision and detachment.

Consistently maintaining that “photographs don’t need words,” Yanagisawa situated himself outside the dominant currents of his time, neither subscribing to the radical visual strategies of Provoke nor aligning with the so-called Konpora movement. What emerges in Tracks of the City is therefore not a stylistic affiliation but a singular vision, a photographic language that remains unmistakably his own.

About the Author

Shin Yanagisawa (1936–2008) was a Japanese photographer whose work occupies a distinctive position in the history of postwar Japanese visual culture. Trained in the milieu of rapid modernization, he developed a photographic practice that emphasized clarity, compositional rigor, and an insistence on the autonomy of the image. His oeuvre is characterized by a sustained engagement with the urban landscape, particularly Tokyo, during a period of profound social and architectural transformation.

Although contemporaneous with both the Provoke group and the Konpora photographers, Yanagisawa remained independent of these movements, cultivating instead a vision that rejected programmatic affiliations. His photobooks, most notably Tracks of the City (1979) and the posthumously published Untitled (2017), articulate a body of work that is at once historically situated and resistant to categorization. Today, Yanagisawa is recognized for his contribution to redefining the possibilities of photographic observation in Japan’s era of accelerated change.