Fuji. . - Media - book review

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Jonathan Lewis

Chris Steele-Perkins

New York: Umbrage Editions, 2002

AHHH! This book makes me so angry! I use the exclamation mark to indicate that I have not entirely lost all sense of proportion--it Is only a book after all--but what a book it could have been. To cut a long story short, there are some fantastic photographs here but there are some bad ones too. If only Chris Steele-Perkins had cut his story short I might be waxing lyrical right now instead of ranting like a lunatic.

To set the scene, Fuji contains just over 100 color photographs of contemporary Japan on and around Mount Fuji, the country's highest peak. Steele-Perkins plays a game of cat and mouse with this national icon, as he prowls methodically within a 60-mile perimeter of its slopes, catching glimpses of it behind unsuspecting natives or even, when reflected in windows or a mirror, behind the viewer himself. If you are thinking Where's Waldo? you are not far off. In fact the inspiration for Fuji came from a more direct source: Hokusai's "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, an enchanting series of early nineteenth-century woodcut prints depicting aspects of everyday Japanese lire, all under the ever-watchful gaze of the eponymous mountain. In the most celebrated image, The Great Wave, you can spot the snow-capped peak in background, disguised as a small wave.

Fun and games aside, however, Steele-Perkins, a seasoned Magnum photographer of some 23 years. has a serious purpose--namely to document the lives and surroundings of the inhabitants of this part of the world--and to this end the faithfully records the anthropological gamut. There are grannies and grandpas; mums and dads; school kids with their backpacks and babies in their prams; farmers, fishermen, soccer players; photographers, painters, parachutists; bathers, builders, baseball batters; motorcyclists, bicyclists and even a monocyclist; pilgrims, monks and a devill And let's not forget the dogs, cats, ducks, elephants and a very surreal bearl

The list goes on and on, but unfortunately, and to the detriment of the book as a whole, the rigor that Steele-Perkins displays in his choice of subject matter is disappointingly lacking when it comes to aesthetics, It is hard to comprehend the juxtaposition of such monumentally beautiful pictures as that of the Mobil gas station at dusk, the little girl in a playground on her monocycle, or the Egglestonian "snap" of orange plastic leaves against a blue sky, with such god-awful ones as the elephants seen through a car window at a safari park, a blurry bunch of motorcyclists in a car park, or lukewarm coverage of the annual fire festival. I can only surmise that it was out of some noble sense of photojournalistic duty to try to "tell the whole story" that these weaker images were included. For me, this is where the book fails. Picasso once said, "An artist must be two people. One who knows how to paint, and one who knows when to stop." Chris Steele-Perkins knows how to photograph. I am not sure that he knows h ow to edit.

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