Olympic Tokyo Zine

I made a zine with some photos that I took in Tokyo during the delayed Olympic Games in July/2021. Looking back to these pictures, I thought it would be interesting to see them in printed form, as a real document of those difficult days in everyone’s life. At that time I was trying to find some beauty on the streets as a way to make sense of everything that was happening.

The late Tokyo 2020 Olympics is going to be remembered for a long time. Hopefully in a good way, if that’s even possible. I first went to Tokyo in 2005, for just one day, and it was enough for me to get completely hooked. I don’t pretend to tell you exactly why I love this place so much, because I think this is an impossible mission. There’s no way I can synthesize all the aspects of this city that make it what it is, but the way I see it, Tokyo is the city of “NOW”. 

And what I mean by that is that this place is there for us; controversial, diverse, discordant, eclectic, beautiful and - most importantly - EPHEMERAL. 

No great monuments, no great plazas, just an accumulation of human structures, behaviors, acts and dreams. 

A place that continuously change no matter how attached you were to how it was before. A place that reconstructed itself twice, just in the 20th century. 

The 1964 Olympic Games were a blast. Japan was experiencing a very prosperous decade, and all the transformations the city went through at that time were leading it to a wealthy future. And again, for those who experienced that moment and took that wealthy heritage for granted, this may be a completely different outcome.

Personally, I was really looking forward to this moment, not only because I had tickets to some games, but actually to see how an enormously populous city like this would perform in a global event, with people from all over the world just hanging around, but all we could see were policemen and barriers everywhere around the Olympic arenas.

Besides that, Tokyo will always be a magical place for me, and still, I felt the obligation to document this particular time and place in history the best way I could.

If you’re interested on buying the zine, just click here.

Any purchase would be a huge help for me. Thanks!