Hiroyuki Ito: The Flip Flop Diary: Japan 2011–2018

When New York Times freelance photographer Hiroyuki Ito returned to his native Japan for the first time in almost 20 years, he found himself viewing it as a foreign country. People and practices that were once familiar now seemed strange. So he did what any artist would do: he began to document.

Mr. Ito’s exhibition, The Flip Flop Diary: Japan 2011–2018, explored his initial and subsequent returns to Japan, and what he has seen there. From a gleeful child in a lion head to a peaceful woman on a teeming subway to ladies in kimonos in front of a Starbucks, his pictures often juxtapose opposites. Joy and ferocity, calm and chaos, the old and the new. 

Learn more about the artist in our interview with him.