Comprising more than two hundred photos taken over the
course of three weeks, the third book in the Still Lifes series
leaves the United States for the busy streets of Tokyo, resulting
in a volume that is both of a piece with and dramatically different
from Still Lifes: California and Still Lifes: USA. The roughly translated advertising blurb for the Tokyo hotel where Rudy VanderLans booked his stay promised "a world of stillness and motion,¿ and VanderLans used this as his creative prompt.
Over the course of his stay, VanderLans walked over a hundred
miles, camera in hand, capturing an extensive document of
Tokyo's lived-in details. Just as much care has been taken in the
arrangement of the photos, with adjacent images often mirroring
one another despite their wildly different subjects. Conspicuously
devoid of human figures for such a populous city, these photos capture a Tokyo beneath the surface of the crowd, presenting
a version of the city rarely seen in media of any kind.