The fourth and final edition of the photobook classic. Once again better, more dense, more beautiful, more oppressive than all predecessors. With Tokyo Compression, Michael Wolf struck a nerve: his portraits of people on their way through the Tokyo subway, constrained between glass, steel and fellow travellers, have won many awards and been shown in exhibitions around the globe. The topic kept haunting Wolf, who returned to Tokyo again and again to immerse himself in the subsurface insanity. Before Wolf, other artists created subway series, among them Bruce Davidson and Walker Evans, but the concept of 'Compression' is different: Wolf is not interested in seat cushions, graffiti, interior architecture or the traveller's relation to those things. He rather discovered the subway system as a suitable place to investigate the mental state and aggregate condition of city dwellers, leaving out all accessories and focusing just on faces and figures. With his radical aesthetics he creates enormously intensive pictures that, in a distressing, shocking manner, aim directly into the portrayed people's inner life. With his accompanying essay Tokyo Subway Dreams, Christian Schüle delivers a gloomy diagnosis of mass loneliness in modern megacities.