SHIBUYA アーカイブ - The Tokyo Snap

Street Snap #56 Shibuya Station Construction, June 2026 | GR IV

Dean — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:41:49 +0000

I recorded Shibuya, which I regularly observe from fixed points. In this city, where large-scale redevelopment keeps the landscape in constant flux, the scenery is updated little by little each time I visit. That is why I feel compelled to come back and record it more often than any other place.

This time, I began walking from the National Yoyogi Stadium, designed by Kenzo Tange. Along the way, I photographed a wall with a large print of a Daido Moriyama image that had long caught my attention, then headed toward Shibuya Station. Around the station, I recorded the flow of people passing by, construction vehicles, and the outline of the new city visible beyond the temporary barriers, and I finished at the construction site on the former Tokyu Department Store site in Dogenzaka.

Using my familiar GR IV, I photographed on a clear, hot day in June in Hard Monotone. I wanted to capture the strength of the light and shadow as they were. ■

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Street Snap #54 Shibuya Station | KODAK Charmera Keychain Digital Camera debut

Dean — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:59:05 +0000

I photographed the area around Shibuya Station using the “KODAK CHARMERA Keychain Digital Camera.”

I usually document Shibuya with the RICOH GR IV. However, when I looked at the images taken with the “KODAK CHARMERA,” the impression was entirely different. Although it is the same place, it feels as if I am touching a different layer of the city. There is a strange sense of distance, and familiar scenes begin to emerge as something new.

With a camera this small and light, like a keychain, I initially doubted whether it could really take photographs. Yet the images it produced clearly captured the streets of Shibuya.

This time, I first tried all of the frames and filters. After that, I shot by randomly switching settings, following my instincts in the moment.

The Shibuya that appears in these images, while still a contemporary city, carries a texture that feels slightly out of sync in time. With its subtly muted tones and rough resolution, it resembles a kind of time slip back to 1987, giving familiar scenes an entirely different context.

For a while, I plan to continue carrying the “KODAK CHARMERA” as a keychain. I am interested to see what kinds of moments it will capture in everyday life, and how that experience might evolve over time. ■

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Street Snap #51 Shibuya Station Construction, May 2026 | GR IV

Dean — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:53:40 +0000

These are street snapshots I regularly take around Shibuya Station. The area in front of the station, in particular, is in the midst of a large-scale redevelopment and continues to change its appearance day by day. Temporary barriers, scaffolding, cranes, and constantly shifting pedestrian routes. A sense of the extraordinary, belonging to a city still in the process of becoming, lingers in this place, different from that of a completed urban landscape.

Shibuya has always been a place where chaos and vitality coexist, but the redevelopment site seems to amplify that character even further.

For someone who lives in Shibuya, photographing this scenery on a regular basis does not feel like a special act, but rather a natural extension of documenting everyday life. It is not only the finished city that matters, but also the time that exists along the way. (Though it might also be said that a city like Shibuya is never truly “complete.”)

This time, I used the “Vivid” image control on the GR IV. I wanted to capture the colorful atmosphere of Shibuya using the distinctive color rendering of this camera. I hope to continue recording the “present moment” of Shibuya Station as it keeps changing. ■

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Street Snap #50 Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum | GR IV

Dean — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 13:06:57 +0000

I visited the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo. This was the atelier and residence where Taro Okamoto lived and continued his work for more than forty years. Photography is permitted throughout the museum, and this time I explored the space with the GR IV in hand.

Okamoto’s works possess an intensity that seems to reject established frameworks and balance. In contrast, the building itself, designed by architect Junzo Sakakura, presents a composed and restrained form. The tension between these two elements gives the site its distinctive atmosphere. The carefully ordered architecture functions as a “frame” that contains the works, acting as a device that holds back their imminent sense of explosion.

Inside the museum, Okamoto’s artworks are interwoven with life-sized figures, an atelier bearing traces of his creative process, and a garden enveloped in greenery. Together, they create a vivid presence, as if Okamoto were still working here even now.

For this series, I used the GR IV’s “Vivid” color image setting. By emphasizing the contours of color, I sought to record more clearly the relationship between Okamoto’s ideas and the space that absorbed and sustained them. ■

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Street Snap #48 Shibuya on New Year’s Day captured with FUJIFILM QuickSnap

Dean — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:23:47 +0000

On New Year’s Day 2026, I photographed Shibuya using a FUJIFILM QuickSnap.

First released in 1986, QuickSnap is a disposable camera that integrates film and camera into a single unit. Before the widespread adoption of digital cameras, it was once a hugely popular product.

I chose to use QuickSnap on New Year’s Day, a moment that carries a quiet sense of significance. The location was Shibuya. It is a place I have photographed many times, a kind of personal home ground. By returning to a familiar setting, I hoped the distinctive qualities of photographs taken with QuickSnap would become more apparent.

Using QuickSnap again for the first time in decades, I was reminded of its inherent limitations: the slight mismatch between the viewfinder and the final image, and the inability to review photographs on the spot. These constraints felt both nostalgic and unexpectedly refreshing. The limitation of just 27 frames also sharpened my attention to each exposure, allowing chance and unpredictability to play a more visible role.

The photographs taken with QuickSnap carry a sense of nostalgia, yet they unmistakably belong to the present. I would be glad if viewers could sense this quiet tension between memory and the present moment within these images. ■

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Street Snap #43 GR DIGITAL 20th Anniversary at GR SPACE TOKYO

Dean — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:50:58 +0000

I visited GR SPACE TOKYO in Harajuku, where an event was held to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the GR DIGITAL. The venue featured exhibitions tracing the evolution of the GR series, limited anniversary goods, and a special service for rewriting the camera’s shutdown screen. Each element highlighted the legacy of the GR.

On this day, I walked from Shibuya toward the venue, taking a slow photo walk and stopping by both GR SPACE TOKYO and the SO1 Gallery. As a long-time GR user, I felt fortunate to take part in this twentieth anniversary event. For this visit, I set the GR IV’s Image Control to Negative Film and documented the autumn streets of Shibuya in a gentle and muted tone. ■

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Street Snap #42 Shibuya Station Construction, October 2025

Dean — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 09:18:55 +0000

Shibuya Station is in the midst of a once-in-a-century redevelopment. Its completion is still years away, and the landscape continues to change day by day. I feel that this ever-shifting process itself is worth documenting. The city under construction seems to embody Shibuya’s true sense of chaos even more than the finished one ever could.

In front of the station lies a vast open space, where countless cranes rise into the sky. The sight of people navigating the constantly shifting temporary pathways, intersecting with the movement of heavy machinery, seemed to blur the boundary between order and disorder.

This time, I experimented with the GR IV’s new image control mode, “Cinema (Yellow).” I wanted to explore how light and shadow, time and space, could be captured through it. I hope to keep recording the “now” of Shibuya Station with this camera in the days to come. ■

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Street Snap #41 Shibuya at Night in the Rain with GR IV

Dean — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 17:17:38 +0000

I captured Shibuya while walking through the city on a rainy night. Holding an umbrella made it hard to keep the composition steady, and some shots were blurred. But that instability seemed to capture the raw atmosphere of the streets more truthfully.

On Saturday night, Shibuya was overflowing with people, including many visitors from abroad. Neon lights reflected on the wet pavement, and the rhythm of umbrellas moving through the crowd gave the city a distinctive vibrancy.

I tried to make use of the GR IV’s agility to capture moments of light, shadow, and motion.
Amid the heat and noise of the night, I wanted to record the pulse of Shibuya as it was. ■

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Street Snap #40 Maki Fumihiko and Spiral – A Place Where Art Lives, Aoyama with GR IV

Dean — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:02:19 +0000

I visited the exhibition “Maki Fumihiko and Spiral: A Place Where Art Lives” held in Aoyama, Tokyo.
The exhibition commemorates the 40th anniversary of Spiral and the 60th anniversary of Maki and Associates, founded by architect Fumihiko Maki.

The venue itself was Spiral, where original concept drawings, models, and blueprints from the early design stages were on display, many shown to the public for the first time. Spiral is one of Maki’s representative works, and I have visited this building many times, as it stands in the heart of Aoyama. Yet seeing an exhibition about the building itself in that very space was an experience that felt both natural and profoundly luxurious.

Inside the architecture that gently draws the bustle of the city into its interior, I captured the atmosphere, where architectural ideals and reality meet, with my GR IV. ■

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Street Snap #39 Daikanyama Soryo Festival 2025, GR Booth, with GR IV

Dean — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:55:26 +0000

The “Soryo Festival” (Daikanyama Cool Breeze Festival) was held across Daikanyama, and I visited after hearing that a RICOH GR booth would be there. Although the festival spread throughout the area, I mainly walked around Daikanyama Tsutaya Books.

At the GR booth, I had the chance to hear about the new GR IV from the staff and was delighted to receive special GR items such as a fan, a catalog, and stickers. Around the venue, many stalls lined the streets like a summer fair, and the bookstore was filled with lively energy on this holiday afternoon.

On that day, GR IV units were available for visitors to try, but I was fortunate to already own one. With my own GR IV, I was able to record the vibrant scenes of the festival. Under the clear Daikanyama sky, I chose black-and-white, so that the colorful liveliness was faithfully recorded as contrasts of light and shadow. ■

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