In the early 1980s, Joji Hashiguchi photographed young men and women congregating in the places where youth go to find refuge from the world. He found them in rough cafes, scuzzy bus stops, and on battered street corners. Working within the tradition of street and documentary photography, his black and white pictures capture the universality of youth in moments of uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Among them appear those bright (yet fleeting) moments between friends when a sense of togetherness appears — they realize they aren’t so alone, despite their drive to be.
In the early 1980s, Joji Hashiguchi began to document the plight of the young with his debut work, “Shisen.” Stifled by the mounting pressures posed b…
Turning his lens on the global stage, Hashiguchi traveled through Liverpool, London, Nuremberg, West Berlin, and New York in a quest to further chronicle communities of disenfranchised youths abroad. In these five cities, Hashiguchi witnessed the complex cocktail of self-destructive discord lurking beneath the superficial excesses of city life. Revealing the entrenched drug addiction, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, unemployment, and poverty that pervaded urban centers then as now, Hashiguchi’s photos challenge the viewer to reexamine what we have both become and lost.
A newly edited and expanded edition of Jōji Hashiguchi’s seminal photobook is published this month. Here, the photographer reflects on his past, and the time he spent documenting the plight of youth in the 1980s
A newly edited and expanded edition of Jōji Hashiguchi’s seminal photobook is published this month. Here, the photographer reflects on his past, and the time he spent documenting the plight of youth in the 1980s
