Cities on Instagram: future city

Ellingham, a creative based in Tokyo, came to photography while travelling through northern Japan shortly after it was devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Volunteering in the town of Otsuchi-Cho in Iwate, he was moved to capture on camera the foundations of buildings and towns that had been exposed in the disaster and streets that no longer existed. Shooting with a Sony a7RII camera fitted with specialist architectural lenses, he began sharing his work on Instagram as @cbje_tokyo in earnest in 2016.
Since then, Ellingham has moved to exploring other facets of the urban experience, including Japanese public housing in his series Danchi Dreams and the night-time neon lights of some of the world’s high-tech megacities in Derive. He finds his subject matters by exploring places on foot and without a map, aiming to flow through a city by following streets and paths that catch his attention.
His favourite city to shoot so far is Shanghai, he says, with the skyscrapers, infrastructure, art and culture combining to create an inspiring vision of the world to come. “I only spent four days there, but in that time I felt like I had seen the future.”
Hunt Elle, “I felt like I had seen the future’: capturing east Asian megacities”, The Guardian, available at:
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Violeta Rodríguez Becerril (March 7, 2021). Cities on Instagram: future city. Instacity. Retrieved February 9, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/qd6d