"Tokyo-Yokosuka 1976-1983". FIrst Edition. Signed copy.

Prices in US Dollars
Release date: April 1, 2019
Hardcover 7 x 9.5 inches (17.8 x 24.1 cm)
184 pages
100 color and b/w photographs
Foreword by Christopher Phillips

With publishing made possible by supporters who know my work via Instagram (where I'm @gregforaday), the photographs in "Tokyo-Yokosuka 1976-1983" are artifacts of a pre-bubble Tokyo, before it acquired imaginative shape as the late 20th century's default for a 21st century city. Remnants of post-war scruffiness combine with a transitional modernity, ground level Tokyo just as it was about to explode slow-motion into our late 20th century consciousness.

While living in Tokyo I also started photographing in Yokosuka, just southwest of Tokyo, home to a sprawling US Navy base and the many bars and clubs clustered nearby. I learned about Yokosuka, and other bases, via the American Forces Far East Network (FEN) radio, at the time the only English language broadcaster in Japan.

Looking at these pictures now, four decades after they were made, like all “old” photographs they end up as a record no matter what the intentions at the time. But today they also seem to provide a unexpected glimpse of two historical streams passing each other headed in opposite directions: one, the decline of US pre-eminence in the post-war world, particularly in Asia; the other, the emergence of an Asian city, the non-West, as the default for what the future might look like.