Katsumi Watanabe was a photographer based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. From the mid-1960s, he worked around Kabukicho as a street portrait photographer, documenting the people who lived and moved through the margins of the city: sex workers, yakuza, young people, and others who gathered in Shinjuku’s streets and nightlife districts.
Hot Dog; Shinjuku 1999–2000 is a photobook set in Shinjuku at the turn of the millennium. Having photographed the area for decades, Watanabe captures the people passing through the city, the atmosphere of the night, and the changing face of an increasingly multicultural urban landscape between 1999 and 2000.
Different from the dense portraits found in his earlier works such as Shinjuku Guntoden, this book reveals the lightness, restlessness, vulgarity, and quiet melancholy of Shinjuku at the end of the twentieth century. It is an important later work for understanding Watanabe’s lifelong engagement with Shinjuku as a kind of urban stage.
Hot Dog 新宿1999-2000 / Hot Dog; Shinjuku 1999-2000 渡辺克巳 / Katsumi Watanabe ワイズ出版 / Wides Shuppan, 2001 183 × 225 × 13 mm Softcover 152 pages 115 images Wides Shuppan Photography Series 10
