Tokyo-based photographer and retoucher Rumi Ando creates unsettling urban landscape photography of Tokyo. Seemingly nostalgic yet out-of-place, Ando has retouched each of her photographs, painstakingly removing all evidence of human life except for the buildings they’ve built. All windows, A/C units, antennas, ducts—”noise” as Ando calls them—have vanished, leaving only the skin of a city: a nude Tokyo.
Rumi Ando began her Tokyo Nude project in 2020 and has since created multiple cityscapes that are now part of a photo book. Ando’s work, which is akin to stepping inside a parallel world, is also on view at the Tokyo bookseller Book And Sons now through August 22, 2021. You can see more of Ando’s work on her Instagram account, where she’s posted retouched photos of other Japanese cities as well.
In a project from a similar vein but applied in an opposite fashion, Japanese architect Daigo Ishii applied the “skin” of Tokyo onto other global cities.
