Tokio in Eclisse

Antonioni’s eclipse provided a point of reference, confirmation, inspiration and a potential goal for Daniele Dainelli and his photographs of Tokyo. The photographer spent many months in Tokyo, not as an ordinary tourist but as someone seeking out places that he might use as points of reference in a city that not only could, but had to become familiar. Even so, daily life seems to remain immersed in a sort of eclipse that changes the way everything looks making it appear distant.
Dainelli’s experience of this Asian city - a modern metropolis par excellence - was just like that depicted in the famous film; the same see-sawing between chaos, long silences and cityscapes of cold, geometric architecture. The people who populate daily life in Tokyo move through the city without communicating with each other and even the city’s physical structures seem to have taken on the same silent sense of impending doom inherent in the human presence.
For Daniele Dainelli, Tokyo became the focus and the symbol of a complex and multi-faceted daily life that is always questioning and one that just when it seems about to reveal itself, closes up again, surrounded by an atmosphere in which the minutiae of reality become little metaphors for an existence that is only transitory, passing through, made up of broken images and unexpressed feelings.
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Daniele Dainelli
Was born in Livorno in 1967. Endowed with a particular gift for using colour and investigative skills he is able to produce powerful images that are extremely expressive. His “Metropolis” project produced a series of reportages in colour, on some of the world’s most important metropolises, which attracted the attention of various important international newspapers. Having moved to New York, he documented changes in the city both pre and post 9/11. His “le Stanze dell’Arte” (rooms for Art) won the 2002 Canon Prize for best photographic project. His next endeavour was a lengthy photographic project on the Balkans and he was featured in one of the photographic exhibitions in 2003 International Festival in Rome. He was the man behind the lens that produced the photos for the 2004 FNAC diary, the same year that he moved to Tokyo. The following year saw him participate in a collective project called “Eurogeneration”. He was one of four photographers from the Contrasto agency involved in the “Solo in Italia” book produced by the agency’s publishing company in 2008, and in fact he has been a Contrasto staff member since 1999.