Julia Abe, Pink Wig, Shibuya

Julia Abe was born in 1994, half Japanese and half Brazilian, and by her early twenties she was the face that Tokyo’s underground photographers, street-style labels, and East Asian magazines all wanted on their work at the same time. The kind of face where the city seems to arrange itself obligingly around her in every frame.

Which didn’t mean the city was actually obliging. Japan has a complicated relationship with mixed-heritage people—even those who were born there, raised there, who are Japanese in every way that should count. The welcome is conditional in ways that don’t always surface until they do. Her Twitter had that edge to it sometimes: not bitterness exactly, more like a dry acknowledgment that some doors open differently depending on how you look and what you’re carrying.

The Places + Faces shoot catches her at night in Tokyo with her crew—unhurried, loose, a pink wig making the whole thing feel like a scene from Lost in Translation that Coppola cut for being too perfect. There’s a shot at the Shibuya crossing, the most photographed intersection in the world, and she’s standing in the middle of it with no apparent interest in reaching the other side. Half the city at her back. The other half somewhere ahead.