edited by tobia piatto (tobia.piatto@positive-magazine.com)
photographs by Jürgen Bürgin
Jürgen Bürgin was born in Lörrach in Germany in 1971. He was studying German literature, linguistics and economy in Freiburg and received a degree at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg in 1998. He began to work for movie business in Berlin in 1999 as public relations manager for a film PR agency and has since participated in the PR for numerous movie releases in Germany. As a creative counterpart to his daily job he is working as an urban photographer, and has been shooting in Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, London, San Francisco, Chicago, Tokyo and New York. In 2011 he was shortlisted for a Sony World Photography Awards in the category After Dark.
Explanation about the photoproject:
“Tokyo is a crowded and vital city, full of people, with a huge variety of subcultures. I travelled to Japan in May this year to shoot some urban and street photographs that capture this variety. My idea of Tokyo, before I visited it, was influenced by pictures of crowded subways, by street crossings full of thousands of people. And indeed it was like this. But I was astonished to find quiet and peaceful places and moments too, moments of poetry, of beauty. I tried to shoot street scenes that represent solitude, togetherness, silence, relaxation, joy, love – emotions and moods that are contratictory to our stereotypes of metropolises. And I tried to capture a tiny section of some of those millions of untold stories in the ‘stream of life’ of the people of Tokyo. Some of those people I only saw for seconds, but ideally my photos evoke stories in the mind of the beholders, about who those people could be, about what they did that night or day when I photographed them, about their lives, if they are lucky or if they are despaired.”
