Kyoichi Tsuzuki proposes a full-immersion into the private lives of the Japanese. At the beginning of the 1990s, he set about offering a glimpse into what happens beyond the public life of the Japanese capital in the form of a photo-reportage. You can see private homes in Tokyo that are usually inaccessible, and traditional housing mixed with western consumer culture. For his Happy Victims series, Tsuzuki took portraits of strangers in their rooms surrounded by the clothes and accessories of their favourite designer. The treasures of these ‘fashion victims’ literally take over their tiny flats, echoing the considerable strain this passion places on their budget. Simultaneously, the photographer reveals an aspect of the personality of these willing victims, for whom fashion, fetishised, becomes a cult object and the mirror of personal aspirations. Those staged scenes are part of the construction of each person’s identity, and feed a form of contemporary mythology. A Buddhist monk with a Comme des Garçons shopping habit, an Alexander McQueen collector listening to neighbours through paper-thin walls—photographed at home, their collections before them, Kyoichi’s anti-heroes exist in parallel to the fashion universe of fame, fantasy, and glamour. Tsuzuki’s works, while eloquently commenting on living conditions in Japanese cities, do not reflect the distanced gaze of a sociologist analysing the world around him. Rather they testify far more to the empathy – tinged with a light irony – felt by the artist when confronted with the desire for possession that motivates these ‘happy victims’.Between 1999 and 2006, before fast fashion and social media changed the world forever, Kyoichi Tsuzuki published 87 instalments of this series in the fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin.Happy Victims was first published in book form in 2008. While the cover and belly band have been completely reworked, this new edition of Happy Victims maintains a simple, documental format: one happy victim per spread, Kyoichi’s photos supplemented by a short commentary on the individual and his or her daily schedule.
Community Notes