Tokyo Greenhouses in Black and White
Im Treibhaus (Japanese title: 温室) turns Takeshi Shinoda's camera on the interiors of Tokyo's greenhouses — spaces defined not by their architecture but by what accumulates inside them: oppressive humidity, the sickly-sweet weight of tropical air, and a quality of enclosure that makes the familiar difficult to place. Working in high-contrast black-and-white, Shinoda produces prints that are unusually dark, rendering tropical plants as something between botanical specimen and psychological pressure — organic forms made strange by their controlled environment, at once exotic and almost unnatural.
The book follows Station (2022), in which Shinoda applied the same close-reading method to Tokyo's train stations — transitional, functional spaces carrying a persistent quality of suspension. Im Treibhaus extends that discipline to a subject that resists easy classification: not quite nature, not quite architecture, but a managed environment in which the organic is made to perform. The continuity between the two books is methodological rather than thematic — the same refusal of documentary distance, the same high-contrast printing, the same attention to atmosphere over structure.
Published by Sokyusha (蒼穹舎, Tokyo) on 31 May 2025, the book is a hardcover measuring 261 × 216 mm across 58 pages, containing 54 photographs. The edition is limited to 200 copies. Supporting material includes a list of photographed locations and the photographer's biography, both in Japanese and English. Producer: Michitaka Ota. Designer: Akihiko Tsukamoto. Translator: Bonnie Pong-Wai Ma. Printer: SunM Color Co., Ltd.
Im Treibhaus is part of the Photography & Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100. It will be of interest to collectors of photobooks, readers drawn to Japanese Photobooks, and those attentive to the intersection of urban space and natural form.
