Happy Victims: Vivienne Tam, 2001

The Japanese photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki regards himself as a journalist. In numerous series of photographs he acted as a photo reporter, giving insights into the less glamorous areas of Japanese private life. For his book Tokyo Style at the beginning of the 1990s, he succeeded in looking behind the scenes in the capital city and documenting private Tokyo apartments which were otherwise completely inaccessible and in which vestiges of traditional living were combined with Western consumer patterns in a small space. The other side of the tourist clichés is also shown in his book Roadside Japan, which is designed as an “alternative tourist guide” and consists of a collection of curiosities in theme parks and private collections all over the country (and which was then supplemented by Roadside America and Roadside Europe). Tsuzuki also used a documentary style for his report on the hidden side of institutionalized sexuality in Japan, in his photographic series on the Love Hotels, the Image Clubs; and the sex museums which were common there in the 1980s. For his series Happy Victims, which arose in 2002 as a co-production between Mudam and the Festival International des Arts de la Mode d’Hyères as part of a larger project entitled Universe for rent, Tsuzuki photographed collections of clothes of specific fashion brands in the apartments of their owners. The treasures of these “fashion victims” are spread out in their tiny apartments, reflecting the passion for fashion or a specific fashion label which places such a great strain on their financial resources. At the same time, the insights into their protected interior private sphere reveals part of the personality of these fashionistas for whom the fetish of “Fashion” plays a central role in their life. In a mass society which is largely functional and homogenized in its organizational forms, fashion conveys individuality and thus a distinguishable identity. As a consumer product, fashion is under a permanent pressure of innovation, its conceptual value drastically exceeds its purely functional value. The object of consumption almost has a cult status; by acting as a projection surface for identity-creating longings it becomes a fetish, and it is assigned a mythologically inflated significance as a creation by a fashion creator. Tsuzuki's photographs, which tell us much about the circumstances of life in Japanese metropolitan cities, are not so much the result of the perspective of a sober sociologist who is critical of capitalism, rather they betray the understanding of their author, with only a slight touch of irony, in face of the pride in possessions shown by the “happy victims” whom he portrays.