Fred Tougas is a self-taught photographer from Montreal, Canada. He completed a bachelor’s degree in communications before fully investing in freelance photography. The way societies naturally interact with their environments often lead to singular scenes, highlighting the beauty in the mundane. His work is a visual document about the resulting aesthetics of these natural, modified or created environments and the way humankind and its constructs fit into these spaces.
No Word from Tōkyō
I wanted this project to be an objective document about the urban aesthetics of the Japanese society. I wanted it to be a reflexion about an awaiting dystopian future by showing scenes and sights that belonged to the present. My documentary approach has always made me believe I was communicating something about reality. I thought reality should be enough. Enough to anyone perceptive and sensitive enough to understand that beauty resided in the simplest things. But I realized I was violently getting tired of it. The state of mind I was in while spending a whole month alone in Japan forced me to want fiction. Although everything that caught my eye was indeed part of something real that occurred naturally, the elements I was choosing to observe and what I deliberately left out of the frame were part of a world of fiction I was creating for myself. All the elements I included would be part of that world. Then this body of work is mirroring my thoughts and my state of mind in these moments. Then there is nothing objective about this visual document. It’s all subjective and it’s all about me. But ain’t it pretty?
To view more of Fred Tougas’s work please visit his website.