Tokyo Midnight

Tokyo Midnight explores the Asian megalopolis, and the ways Tokyo comes to life between dusk and dawn in a futuristic neonscape, a time when the natural light disappears, and the artificial light takes over.

The images were photographed in early 2019 and early 2020 (just before the Covid 19 pandemic exploded), the year the original Blade Runner film was set, and as such interrogate the commercial nature of urban utopias while celebrating the technical and creative sophistication of the East, as to opposed to the rapidly diminishing global dominance of the West.

‘Life passes and buildings decay; nothing stays the same. Kip Scott's portrait of my vibrant home city at night illuminates these liminal moments and spaces, corners of the city on the cusp of change. His images hint at the ura that lies the other side of the omote, encapsulating the entire glorious vastness of the city, with its beauty and its ugliness, its dark and its light, a place that seems forever on the cusp of day and night.’ – Katherine Tamiko Arguile, author of Meshi: A personal history of Japanese food.