The Class Of – Tokyo Legacy Half

“The Class Of” is an ongoing series in which Beinghunted. works alongside photographers to portrait as many people as a single event will hold: a contemporary take on the school yearbook, where the group is the subject but no individual disappears into it. After its first two chapters at Paris Fashion Week and the Berlin Marathon in 2023, the format travelled to Japan for its third edition, built around New Balance’s Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon 2024 and produced in partnership with Tokyo running crew Ikism RC.

Across the race weekend, Beinghunted. joined New Balance’s Tokyo program, from early-morning shakeout runs and local meetups to a shared lunch and post-race celebrations, photographing more than 50 participants one by one. Seasoned marathoners, first-time runners, crew leaders and supporters were each captured as an individual and paired with a caption in the spirit of a yearbook entry. Custom T-shirts and a space dressed in a bespoke identity completed a world that felt less like an activation and more like a class reunion waiting to happen.

A race is usually photographed as a field, a wave of bibs and unfamiliar faces moving past the lens. “The Class Of” inverts that logic. By slowing down to portrait runners one at a time, the project treats a mass-participation event as a collection of individuals, each with their own reason to be there. The yearbook framing does the quiet work: it confers belonging, and it gives people something they want to keep and share.

For New Balance, this located the brand inside a culture rather than in front of a product. Nothing in the work argues for performance or technology; association is built through people, place, and a sense of occasion. Tokyo extended a mission the series has carried from the start: to spotlight the people who make major cultural moments possible, meeting a running community by handing it a portrait worth keeping.