After night falls, and the salarymen [ business men ] all return home, in Tokyo's urban sprawl there lies an unseen beauty. The lights of empty streets, hallways light up the quiet neighborhoods. Wandering these streets the colors, the silence calls out to all; however, these calls usually go unheard. Open up your eyes, and see the plain in way that has never been seen before. Beauty surrounds us. It fills our frame of vision, but we got open our eyes and truly look for it.
 

I walked home from the station in a complete funk. Earlier that week I had got a text message that one of my cats had suddenly died. I needed air, time to sort out the thoughts in my head. That entire month felt like a I was riding a roller coaster of emotion. I usually hop on the bus to get back home, but tonight was different, I needed to walk. The thought of getting on the bus with all those strangers was unthinkable.

Space, open air, that's what I craved. My feet shuffled off in to the damp Tokyo night. A few blocks from the station the neon lights faded and it was just, cool dark concrete. An urban landscape sprawled out before my eyes. These eyes have seen so much concrete. So much gray that it all just melted into a blob, but tonight my vision saw beyond the blob.

Somehow, I looked more intensely at these concrete apartments. This time the cool grays called out to me. They had always been silent, I know this cause I had passed by them so often. Tonight, this evening, it all seemed surreal. Long hallways with cool fluorescents casting their blue glow out into the night. The repetition of doors, lights, tiles, all gelled into a beauty that I never had seen before.

I slowly unzipped my camera from it's black nylon pouch. I hit the on button, turned the settings to manual. Unconsciously, I gently placed my camera upright on the concrete floor, set the timer, then pressed the shutter. "CAPTURING," in bold letters filled the little
LCD screen. What seemed like ages before I heard the comforting , CLICK, of the shutter. "PROSSCESING, " filled the screen again, and another eternity. One advantage of all this digital technology is that I could peep the image right away. It was small, no bigger than a few centimeters square, yet it was filled with luscious blue-green hues.

Beauty is out there. It surrounds us, yet most never open there eyes to see. On this night I opened my eyes, heart and mind, and this is what I saw.

Jacob Schere
Tokyo 2006

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