Tokyo Compression Final Cut

The fourth and final edition of Michael Wolf's Tokyo Compression, a series of close portraits of Tokyo commuters pressed against subway windows.

Peperoni Books reworked the book completely for this edition: 89 colour plates in a clothbound hardcover of 120 pages, with images tipped in on the front and back boards, many photographs not seen in the earlier printings, and an added closing sequence the publisher calls a "hidden track". Wolf strips out seats, graffiti and interior architecture and keeps only faces and figures, so the pictures read as a study of the inner state of city dwellers. Christian Schüle's essay "Tokyo Subway Dreams" reads the series as a portrait of loneliness in the megacity.

Martin Parr named the 2010 Tokyo Compression book among the thirty most influential photobooks of 2001-2010, and the series took first prize in the Daily Life category of the 2009 World Press Photo competition. Wolf (1954-2019) also made Architecture of Density and The Transparent City.