Three cities,
crossed on foot,
held still.

Tokyo, New York and London — walked daily, photographed quietly, printed with the grain left in.

The contact sheet City series

Tokyo · New York · London One camera, one 35 mm lens — film pushed, never cropped

01 — Contact sheet

Twelve frames kept, projected one at a time.

Move along the sheet — each frame throws itself onto the wall beside it.

01 / 12 ScrambleCrosswalk, raking light Tokyo — 2016

Silver gelatin, 40 × 60 — editions of fifteen

02 — Cities

Each city, hung its own way.

Three walls, three tempos — the montage follows the pace of the street.

Tokyo

Rain, sodium light and the choreography of crossings — the city that never once looked at the camera.

Frames — 210
Years — 2014–2017
Walked — 1,940 km

Scramble — Tokyo, 2016

Vending light — Tokyo, 2017

Umbrellas — Tokyo, 2016

New York

Steam, steel and stairwell light — photographed at walking pace in a city that has none.

Frames — 184
Years — 2018–2019
Walked — 1,120 km

Underpass — New York, 2019

Stairwell — New York, 2018

Cables — New York, 2019

London

Hard sun, long buses and one lit window at dusk — the quietest of the three, and the slowest to give anything up.

Frames — 231
Years — 2020–2026
Walked — 2,460 km

Night bus — London, 2023

One window — London, 2021

Whitewall — London, 2022

FR 07 — Whitewall, London, 2022

03 — Notes

From the pocket notebooks, typed as written.

Frame, city, time — and the one line that made the picture worth keeping.

04 — About

Ten years on foot, nothing staged.

Self, in the steam — New York, 2019

Dax Romero walks the same streets until they stop posing — then photographs what was there all along.

Working between Tokyo, New York and London since 2014, Romero shoots one camera and one 35 mm lens, on black-and-white film pushed hard. Nothing is staged, recreated or cropped; the frames are printed as they were taken, grain and all.

The work appears in short-run books and small silver-gelatin editions, and occasionally on commission — for publications and brands that want the street itself, not a set built to look like one.

Tokyo Photographic Art Museum — group show 2025
The Photographers' Gallery, London 2024
Magnum — contact-sheet feature 2023
ICP, New York — projection night 2021
Grain City, Vols. I–III — self-published 2017–2023
W. Eugene Smith Fund — shortlist 2019

05 — Contact dax@graincity.photo

Darkroom Unit 9, Copeland Park Peckham, London SE15

Books Sokyusha, Tokyo Dashwood, New York Photobook Corner, London

Elsewhere Photo journal Darkroom notes — letter

Three cities,crossed on foot,held still.