2007 Runner-up
Tomoyuki Sakaguchi—Home

Editorial Statement
On overnight bike explorations of the Tokyo suburb of Tama where he lives, photographer Tomoyuki Sakaguchi creates a waking dream. Making long exposures with his digital camera, Sakaguchi transforms the tidiness of suburbia into a colorful dreamscape where cars seem to be the only inhabitants, and even they are asleep.

Tama is the location of Japan’s largest planned residential development, opened in 1971 on the heels of the Japanese post-war economic boom. In contemporary art and literature such planned communities often come to represent the notion of the soulless uniformity of the commuting class. Sakaguchi’s Tama is a more nuanced place, a place of beauty and magic and even whimsy. Still, there is an eerie evocation of surveillance inherent in these nocturnal images, made while Tama’s residents sleep unawares, which reminds us that any sense of privacy, individuality or autonomy we have in modern culture may well be illusory. —JL

Artist’s Bio
Tomoyuki Sakaguchi (b. 1969, Kagawa, Japan) lives in Tokyo, where he is a lecturer at Musashino Art University. Sakaguchi’s academic background is in earth sciences, but he ultimately pursued a degree in documentary and photo art at Nippon Photography Institute. He has exhibited his work in Tokyo, Yamanashi, and Kyoto, Japan. More work can be viewed online at http://tsaka.jp/.