A lesser-known side of Ryuichi Sakamoto comes into focus this month in Tokyo. SAI in Shibuya will open PHOTO RYUICHI SAKAMOTO on 17 October, an exhibition of photographs the musician took himself during the 1980s, when his career as a composer and performer was taking him around the world. It is a rare chance to see how Sakamoto looked at the world through a medium other than music. His subjects were not the glamorous record of his professional life. The images capture casually noticed things, landscapes glimpsed on tour, the figures of passersby and light falling unexpectedly into a room — fragments of daily life preserved as photographs. The show argues that these private images reveal a gaze that ran parallel to his lifelong investigation of sound. The exhibition is staged with the sponsorship of Polaroid, the Dutch company, and gives pride of place to the instant medium. Alongside the prints, the actual Polaroid cameras Sakamoto used will be shown. Instant photography, which produces an image on the spot and leaves no negative behind, was embraced in the 1970s and 80s by artists from Andy Warhol to Cy Twombly for its distinctive color, texture and element of chance. Sakamoto, too, used it to record the scenery, people and shards of light he encountered on his travels. Timed to the exhibition, a two-volume photo book titled PHOTO RYUICHI SAKAMOTO goes on early sale at SAI, divided into a Polaroid volume and a snapshot volume and edited by Shigeo Goto. The set is priced at 9,680 yen, and its slipcase randomly combines 120 colors of Takeo's NT Rasha paper. The program also includes a talk on 17 October with critic Atsushi Sasaki and Goto, a talk on 1 November with artist Michihiro Shimabukuro and Goto, and a Polaroid workshop on 24 October.