Koenji Pal, Sunday morning

Koenji Pal is a covered shopping arcade. Sunday morning, everything closed. One shutter was raised about sixty centimeters off the ground. Not open, not shut. The mechanism was stuck or forgotten. Through that gap: an empty corridor, the ceiling lights on, and at the far end, Christmas decorations that somebody hadn’t taken down by May.

Three separate failures of timing: Sunday closure, broken shutter, wrong season for the lights. None of them arranged. The frame existed because the mechanism didn’t work.

I didn’t move to a different position. I looked through what was there.

The Christmas lights are the third thing you see in the photograph. First the steel ribs of the shutter in the foreground. Then the depth of the arcade. Then the warm cluster at the far end. Black and white except they’re not black and white. They’re orange in a gray world, which is the point.

First tokio-nacht work. The register is Moriyama: no light placed, no position chosen. The situation made the image.