Place M - Shinjuku

My first visit in Tokyo was to a legendary gallery - probably one of the oldest in the city, open since 1987.

If you look carefully in this quiet intersection of streets, your eye catches a red M on a mailbox at the entrance of an unremarkable building.That must be it. 

I press the elevator button, but notice two framed photos on the landing and think the staircase might hold a few surprises of its own.

3F, a red devil greets me and invites me in.

The staircase at Place M

The red devil

Monuments, by Tom Burke

Tom is there. Next to him, an old leather bag rests on a chair, his cameras peeking out from it.

His chiaroscuro images don’t depict monuments in the usual sense, but fragile traces of what could be one - electric wires, a lamppost, a branch, a light.

Monuments of seeing, almost invisible.

Tom has captured silence.

Between Texas and Japan, his photographs whisper the same thing: light itself is a monument.

Exhibition Monuments - Tom Burke