Photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins The impetus for this three-year project began when Steele-Perkins was offered a gift from his Japanese wife of the famous book by nineteenth-century master printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Struck by the verisimilitude of the prints as historical documents of the life of the peoples around the mountain: woodcutters, fishermen, peasants, aristocrats, as well as their beauty and spiritual aspect, Steele-Perkins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 all are 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 a keyhole of understanding into Japanese worldview as seen by an outsider who has penetrated its diversity with astonishing clarity, metaphysical insight, and profound complicity. About the Author: Chris Steele-Perkins is an award-winning photographer based in London and Tokyo, and a member of the famed cooperative Magnum Photos, founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. Born British in 1947 in occupied Burma, he moved from Rangoon to London in 1949 and graduated with honors from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1970. He started working as a freelance photographer immediately, and his first book,The Teds, was published in 1979 by Travelling Light. The same year Steele-Perkins became a member of Magnum. He subsequently published a range of publications, including About 70 Photographs (Art Council of Great Britain, 1980), La Grèce au Présent (Pompidou Center, 1981), Survival Programmes: In Britain’s Inner Cities (with Nicholas Battye and Paul Trevor (Open University Press, 1982), Beirut: Frontline Story (1983), The Pleasure Principle (Cornerhouse, 1989), St. Thomas Hospital (1992), and Afghanistan, Marval/Umbrage, 2000). His reportages have received the highest awards in photojournalism, including the Tom Hopkinson Prize for British Photojournalism (1988), the Oscar Barnack Prize (1988) from the World Press Association, the Robert Capa Gold Medal (1989) from ICP, the Cooperative Society and One World Awards for the film Dying for Publicity in 1994, and a 2000 World Press Award. Hardcover with jacket / $45 USD 10" x 10" / 132 pages 110 four-color images July 2005 ISBN: 978-1-8841671-26 Website price: $22.50

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