Magic in the mundane: candid shots on the streets of Japan

Blink & you’ll miss them — Travelling back and forth between Tokyo and Kamakura, photographer Shin Noguchi seeks out the extraordinary in the everyday. “I want to share these beautiful moments with other people,” he says.

For the past 10 years, photographer Shin Noguchi has been documenting the streets of Japan.

Based between Tokyo and Kamakura, Noguchi travels to and from the contrasting cities – Kamakura is the old-fashioned settlement to Tokyo’s neon metropolis – seeking out impromptu scenes that offer a window into the human experience.

His photos, which he describes as an attempt to capture “excitement, humanism and beauty among the flow of everyday life”, shine a light on the extraordinary moments that exist within the mundane.

“People are living life desperately. Sometimes lonely, sometimes helping each other, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing,” he says.

“I capture people going about daily life because there are moments that they themselves do not realise are more beautiful and full of human touch than the carefully choreographed movies of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini – or Shakespeare’s plays.”

Together, the images make up Something Here, a project that presents street photography as a tool for illustrating “truths” – snapshots of people when their guard is down, that reveal more than they’d perhaps usually be willing to.

For Noguchi, it’s about sharing the moments that would otherwise go missing among the daily whir. His work is an antidote to the frantic rush of modern life: split-second studies of human emotion, connection and interaction.

“People do not even have time to look at the real figure of themselves in the mirror, as well as seeing the appearance of others. I want to share these beautiful moments with other people,” he adds.

“And, at the same time, I want them to understand that that extraordinary moments exist in our daily lives and that they can happen anywhere – and at anytime.”