Compressed on the Tokyo subway

Michael Wolf is a photographer whose collective body of work focuses on life in mega cities. He creates amazing, beautiful, and haunting visual representations of architecture, street life, domestic interiors, and - my favorite - people crammed in like sweaty sardines on the Tokyo subway in a series called tokyo compression.

he aims his camera at captive passengers pressed against the windows of the crammed tokyo subway. the density is no longer architectural but human, as commuters fill every available square inch of these subway cars. as with architecture of density wolf uses a ‘no exit’ photographic style, trapping the gaze of the viewer within the frame just as the passengers are unable to escape the confinement of these temporary cells. the images create a sense of discomfort as his victims attempt to squirm out of view or simply close their eyes, wishing the photographer to go away. tokyo compression depicts an urban hell and by hunting down these commuters with his camera, wolf highlights their complete vulnerability to the city at its most extreme.

In another series called street view, he finds photos in Google's collection of street view images from cities including Paris and New York. Many of these involve various modes of travel: 

using google’s universal interface, he navigates the french capital, cropping and blowing up isolated moments that are both evocative of the classic street photography of the 1950s, but which also transcend the distinctiveness of paris architecture to suggest an abstract, universal city.

I love Wolf's photography, and you'll likely get lost in his online portfolio. Other favorite series are 100x100, the box men of shinjuku station, and architecture of density.

(via Slate)