Charlie Koolhaas is an artist and photographer. She focuses her work on cities, but only as a backdrop for their inhabitants. Through her images and writing, even seemingly mundane urban scenes allude to past dramas; they capture how cities are always changing and accumulating new layers and traces of intertwining stories.

Charlie will start 2012 in Tokyo, Japan for the launch of her latest publication, Metabolism Trip, published by Heibonsha Publishers. This is a book of photographs and stories that record her journey through many of the remaining buildings of the Metabolist Movement, the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle.

Originally commissioned to contribute to Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, a book published by Taschen, in late 2011. Charlie travelled across Japan In 2009 to photograph how the projects invented by these idealistic thinkers had survived and aged, and how they were being inhabited today. What she found were triumphant and at times eerie constructions that had taken on a life of there own.

Between January the 3rd - 15th an exhibition of these photographs will be at the Koko Gallery in Shibuya, Tokyo. Charlie will be at the Koko gallery on the 7th of January for a talk at 15.00 and book signing at 16.30. http://www.gallery-koko.com/