Street observation

In the 1920s, in Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake, Kon Wajiro recorded people's clothing, shopfronts, and the details of the street, and called it modernology (kogengaku); the members of the Society for Street Observation were influenced by it. In the 1980s several separate lines of street watching came together: Akasegawa Genpei and others hunted for useless but carefully kept fragments of buildings, which they named Hyperart Thomasson; Minami Shinbo studied posted notices; Hayashi Joji recorded manhole covers across Japan. In 1986, timed to the publication of Rojo kansatsu-gaku nyumon (An Introduction to Street Observation) by Chikuma Shobo, they founded the Society for Street Observation. A society in name only, it had no academic organization; what its members looked at was not art but things everyone walks past and hardly anyone looks at twice.

As you look at the photographs in the show, notice which detail each photographer pointed the camera at, and ask yourself whether you would usually notice it.

On your way here today, did you pass anything whose purpose you couldn't name?