Bruce Gilden’s shot of a Japanese businessman carries the same menace as some of his more overtly violent subjects

Bruce Gilden, infamous for his up-close, flashgun New York street photography, visited Japan several times in the 1990s. His pictures of Tokyo, collected in a new book, Cherry Blossom, share the brutal intimacy of his Manhattan archive. His camera has always sought out and ambushed characters, hard men, broken souls, desperate women. “If you can’t smell the street,” he likes to say, “it’s not a street photograph.”

Many of his Japanese pictures are in the faces of Yakuza gangsters; one or two make you wonder how he lived to make the prints. Others go in search of people marginalised by Tokyo society: homeless drunks, ageing sex workers, teenage biker gangs. The man in this photograph is described as a “businessman at lunchtime”, though, reaching into his breast pocket, he seems to carry much of the threat and menace of the more overtly violent of Gilden’s subjects. The man in the foreground with the glasses seems caught up in the moment, along with the viewer; his tweedy hat and coat and the anxious cast of his jaw serve to emphasise the sharpness of the man with the stare.