Tokyo Compression
The politics of looking, and in particular looking upon others’ suffering, sits at the core of Wolf’s candid photographic series. The work prompts not only a reflection on the discomfort before us, but also a self-reflection on our own position as spectator. With city-dwellers framed in states of claustrophobic torment, their anguished faces crushed against the glass pane, the dividing window acts as a literal reinforcement of the commuters’ “otherness”, an ever-present reminder that we are free and they—albeit temporarily—are not. It is a dynamic that is disquietingly symbiotic—our spectatorship depends on their objectification, our agency on their entrapment. We therefore encounter their confinement with an uncomfortable detachment, the commuters representing a condition which is real yet simultaneously distant.