“Take my advice,” Pawel Jaszczuk tells me, inching closer to the screen as his pixellated facial stubble grows clearer by the second. “Pack your bags and go to Tokyo.” His words feel more prophetic than commanding, and for good reason. The vibrant and bustling city has been his home on and off for nearly two decades.
It’s a source of continued inspiration which has let the Polish photographer’s documentative intrigue run amok, taking him on people-watching tours through shibari (rope bondage) studios and drag nights. He’s put out books documenting everything from sweaty sex clubs (Kinky City) and cross-country train carriages (Sleeping Train) to inner-city streets at the witching hour (Salaryman).
A city as hyperreal as they come, Tokyo’s entrancing cultural beauty has been well-documented in popular media, whether that’s in providing a stage for unusual kinship in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or the unfolding of psychedelic melodrama by way of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. But in his 2018 book High Fashion, Jaszczuk’s gaze looks beyond the veneer of neon lights and cartoonish shopfronts for which the city is known, uncovering a culture of hard graft and lengthy working weeks. Dispelling all colour from the vivid worlds of those aforementioned auteurs, what’s left is raw and discomfitting, the reality of many citizens whose work is no play at all.
What initially drew him to Japan those many moons ago was its air of adventure, of freedom, of newness. Jaszczuk had just finished studying at Sydney’s College of the Arts, having relocated from Warsaw in his late teens to pursue a career in graphic design. At some point, he swapped the screen for a camera. “I was sitting there with my computer all day long, with no action. And I like action,” he says, offering a polite smile. He never looked back, following his girlfriend (later wife) Reiko to a new world full of opportunities. “She helped me a lot,” the photographer adds of the assignments, “and without help, I couldn’t do what I’m doing now.”
Work on High Fashion began in 2008 as a black-and-white photo zine titled Salaryman, the Japanese word for “businessman” that avoids all pretension to tell us what this line of work is really about: money. Jaszczuk is unsure as to why he started snapping these pictures, only that one night, as he cycled aimlessly around the city, he found the scenes compelling in some strange way. “I think it was simply curiosity, it was something I had never seen before,” he explains. “The contrast between this beautiful man wearing a suit, looking really sophisticated and chic, laying down on the street, on the asphalt.”
Other locations highlighted in High Fashion include crushed bushes, railings, zebra crossings and the tops of brick walls. He depicts these men slouched on building foundations, clutching road signs or, perhaps most poetically, face-up amid a pile of cigarette ends. Then there are times his subjects are found in pools of their own vomit, covered by stains he’d rather not identify. Often looking unconscious, it’s their clothes that tell the story of who they are. Each trouser leg, misfitted or billowing in a plume of grey pinstripes, and sodden white shirt separates these figures from your average street dweller, binding them instead with an air of white-collar drudgery made far more abrasive when contorted across slabs of gritty concrete.
Jaszczuk echoes the importance their uniforms – synonymous with power, status, enforcement, conformity and community – have in constructing the identities of these strangers, alluding to the book’s tongue-in-cheek title. “It looks like a high fashion [shoot], but it’s deeper,” he says. “It’s metaphorically called High Fashion because it’s the highest possible [in terms of] moral standing.” A push and pull between power and commerce, his muses play on the codes of his first photography gigs, glossy editorials now subverted with stiff and awkwardly outstretched limbs. Rather than engage in selling this lifestyle, his participants reveal parts of themselves in a way that’s entirely accidental, that they might hide if they knew what was really going on.
Initial reactions to the book and its subjects by reviewers focused intently on the men’s states of inebriation and despondency, tending to almost avoid the root cause of their exhaustion altogether. Jaszczuk, it should be said, made efforts to keep their faces out of the shots in relation to privacy concerns. And while terms like “quiet-quitting” and “burnout” are now par for the course when talking about a healthy work-life balance, High Fashion’s social commentary predates such discourse surrounding “grind culture” by more than a decade. We might all be a little wiser to the perils of overworking after living through the pandemic years, but Jaszczuk is still of the belief that nothing has really changed. “They’re still fucking us,” he says with a nod, lewdly motioning a phallic thrust with his fingers.
And who are “they” exactly? That would be the money-hungry powers that be, represented by this cohort of uniform-clad hard partiers. “We should hate those men in their everywhere offices,” writes fellow Tokyo-based photojournalist Damon Coulter in a foreword for the project, aware that these tragic figures have too fallen victim to the mirage of capitalism, “but that is an effort often beyond us.” Instead, Jaszczuk sees “the devastating impact that the economy has had on human beings,” using his series as an opportunity to humanise those chewed up and spat out by the rat race.
These kinds of complex power dynamics are often at play in Jaszczuk’s wider photographic oeuvre, particularly in 2019’s ¥€$U$, an offering that lets rip on the commercialisation of religious iconography by the Catholic church, and Kinky City, a taboo-challenging tour of Tokyo’s sexual underground. I wonder what it is that spurs him to follow through on these investigations, is it to scratch a creative itch? To capture the world’s beauty as it stands? Or maybe it’s that ever-elusive hunt for connection and companionship that deepens with age?
“I want to learn,” he counters, matter-of-factly. “I’m very curious about what’s happening around me. In the clubs, I always talk to people. Part of why I do photography is this interaction with people. What I found in High Fashion was completely different because no one ever woke up, no one talked to me.”
“But,” Jaszczuk adds, “I came back because it’s, like, this is the thing that keeps me going, that keeps me alive, a feeling that I do something important that keeps me calm and stable. It gives me purpose.”
Photography by Pawel Jaszczuk. Pawel Jaszczuk’s ‘High Fashion’ is available here. Taken from Issue 57 of 10 Men – NEW, DAILY, UNIFORM – out now. Order your copy here.
