Cyberpunk City: Reframing Tokyo as a Futuristic Wonderland

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Currently living in the mountains west of Tokyo, Pritchard’s trips to the city are well-planned in advance. Once in the area, he scouts for rooftop access via fire escapes to get above the tangle of wires that can crowd a shot from street level. Some of his works are classic urban landscapes with a twist or two in terms of their site, timelapse or post-production techniques, while others highlight textures and patterns in the city’s fabric.

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At university, his work was primarily analog involving a traditional darkroom film-and-printing approach, the negatives scanned in for digital editing. His work today is fully digital: “I now shoot with a Canon 6D full frame SLR camera with Canon lenses and use Photoshop to composite and manipulate the images. I use a tripod and remote control. Each image is manually composited of bracketed exposures. They are effectively HDR images, but their production is not automated. As they have not had a blanket algorithm applied to them, I can retain photo realism. After digital enhancement, this becomes a kind of hyper-photo realism.”

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He recently completed a fascinating multimedia interface dubbed the Phokus Archives made in Flash and Photoshop with audio by Reso – be sure to check out his Facebook page as well. This interface is a fitting way to interact with his work, feeling like a futuristic game console but also featuring functional ways to zoom in and browse his archives. His next step will be to assemble a book or exhibition from work already online and otherwise.