"This first American exhibition since his death last year, at age 78, includes two dozens prints from a series that Suda shot across Japan mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. Immediately you see a country in an economic boom: contrast a photo of a run-down, low-rent Kyoto neighborhood with a Tokyo scene of a construction site traversed by a fat concrete pouring tube.
But with their sparse, halting details, these photographs dwell more in the realm of poetry than economics. Men sit on benches, faces shadowed by wide-brimmed hats; a woman in Kyoto stares into the distance, her hair ever so slightly out of place. Flowers are everywhere: a lover in Tokyo crosses the street with a bouquet of peonies, and petals scatter on the river in Fukuoka. What blossoms, withers, and is more beautiful for that."
