Stijn Hoekstra possesses the enviable ability to tell stories in a single image — helped, no doubt, by his background in both photography and cinematography. A recent trip to Japan produced the series Cinematic Tokyo: a collection of everyday moments in the lives of strangers he crossed along the way.
Each carefully-composed frame makes use of strong sunlight and hard shadows, colour-corrected to give off a cinematic vibe. Most of the images in the series seem to have been shot in the morning: a lot of them feature a single person in an otherwise-empty street, a hard thing to come by in bustling Tokyo.
When he isn’t jetting off somewhere around the world to work on commercials, documentaries or corporate movies, the Dutch creative is based in Amsterdam. Check out more of his work on his website, Behance and Instagram.
Images © Stijn Hoekstra / with permission