Episode 25 / Stop

Shōichi Aoki’s photographs for the Japanese street-fashion magazine FRUiTS form an extraordinary visual archive of Harajuku street fashion and the inventive ways it was worn. Frontal, colourful and usually full-length, they record young people who had already assembled remarkable images of themselves before Aoki raised his camera. Yet colour is only the visible surface of these photographs.

In this episode, Philippe Guillaume considers something the finished portraits cannot show: Aoki noticing someone, crossing the pavement and asking them to stop. Moving between FRUiTS and Guillaume’s own six-hour walking project in London, the episode explores the request and answer that precede the photograph. Before the portrait exists, one walker must approach another. The photograph preserves the result while withholding the relation that made it possible.

Photography does not always begin when the shutter is pressed. It can also begin when one walker stops another.

Shōichi Aoki launched FRUiTS in 1997 after noticing something new among young people gathering in Harajuku, Tokyo. His street-fashion photographs recorded clothes assembled on the body: handmade pieces, second-hand garments, designer labels, uniforms, kimono elements, obi sashes and geta sandals. The people Aoki photographed had already completed much of the creative work. They had selected, altered, layered and worn everything we see. They had made an image of themselves before he took their photograph. Aoki chose whom to approach and how to frame them, but the visual event that arrested him belonged substantially to the person before his camera.

The portraits appear direct, but the encounter that produced them remains outside the frame. We do not see Aoki crossing the pavement. We do not hear his question or the subject’s response. The photograph shows the result while withholding the relation that made it possible. I recognize something in this method, although my own photographs look completely different.

For a work from my series Between Museum and Public Space, I walked from Tate to the Olympic Stadium and back, a journey that took a little over six hours. I did not follow a map. Instead, I approached strangers and asked them for directions, photographing them as they pointed or explained where I should go next. Every meeting interrupted the walk. I had chosen the destination, but strangers constructed the route in small increments. The photographs could not be taken secretly. I had to speak. The person had to answer and then agree, however briefly, to enter the project. Aoki’s portraits also depend upon this temporary relation between strangers. The difference is that the relation disappears into the picture.

View photographs from Shoichi Aoki’s FRUiTS archive on Dazed

Sources & Further Reading

Images & Works

Shoichi Aoki. FRUiTS, issues 1–50. 1997–2001. Monthly street-fashion magazine.

Shoichi Aoki. Digital photographs published in FRUiTS magazine, Japan. 1997–2002. Seventy-five digital photographs. Powerhouse Collection.

Shoichi Aoki. Fruits. Phaidon Press, 2001.

Shoichi Aoki. Fresh Fruits. Phaidon Press, 2005.

Texts & Ideas

Claire Marie Healy. “Fruits: Future-Pop Fashion.” Dazed, 12 January 2016.

Hiroaki Nagahata. “The Evolution of 90s Tokyo Street Style According to Shoichi Aoki, the Founder of STREET, FRUiTS, and TUNE (Part I).” TOKION, 19 November 2021.

Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. Les presses du réel, 2002. Originally published in French as Esthétique relationnelle in 1998.