40 Years of Portraits by Hiroh Kikai www.juxtapoz.com

For more than 40 years, Japanese photographer Hiroh Kikai has taken the portraits of passersby near the Sensoji temple in Tokyo’s Asakusa district.
Using the same camera, and created during a similar period of time, Kikai sees these series as being inextricably bound together.
For the "Persona" portraits, Kikai poses his subjects against the plain exterior wall of the Sensoji Temple, so that their unique personalities are the focus of the photograph as opposed to the surrounding environment.
In "Tokyo Labyrinth" Kikai creates rigorous compositions of the streets of the city, finding beauty in the most commonplace streets and alleys.
A book of early portraits from the series, titled "Asakusa Portraits" was published in English by Steidl.