Fuji

Dazzling and idiosyncratic photographs of contemporary Japan, celebrating extremes of beauty, the handprint of techno-culture, and the irony of documentary, by the noted British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins. The impetus for this three-year project began when Steele-Perkins was offered a gift from his Japanese wife of the nineteenth-century master printmaker Katsushika Hokusai's famous book, 36Views Of Mount Fuji. Struck by the verisimilitude of the prints as historical documents of the life of the peoples around the mountain: woodcutters, fisherman, peasants, aristocrats, as well as their beauty and spiritual aspect, Steele-Perkins began to research further. He found that most Japanese photographers preferred classic images of the sacred mountain where the elegiac perfection of the peak was the punctum of the work, in opposition to the approach of Hokusai. Steele-Perkins then set out to record a twenty-first century response through the eyes of a sympathetic gaijin. The ensuing work depicts Fuji as a cultural nexus: a dynamic social phenomenon where tourism, farming, industry, religion, urbanization, locomotion, housing and recreation, traditional ceremony and religion are all framed by the potent national symbol of the mountain. Fuji as seen by Steele-Perkins emerges as a meditation about modern Japan and Japanese life. The exquisite images offer a fresh and surprising view of Japan's iconic mountain, and an understanding into Japanese worldview as seen by an outsider who has penetrated its diversity with astonishing clarity, metaphysical insight, and profound complicity. The Fuji exhibition of photographs, organized by Magnum Photos, Ltd. and Umbrage Editions will be showing January 2002 at The Midlands Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK and is travelling through 2005 to six other venues in Europe, Japan, and the United States.