Mount Fuji

Formally, the meticulous if ambiguous composition – the bright glare of sunlight flattens the bleached-white rock outcrop into what could be a flat, triangular spit of beach – positions us above and outside the scene; we cannot quite tell how our ground at our standpoint physically attaches to the topography of the scene below. The image invites us, then to inspect its geometries and aspects from different points of view, especially because we can imagine what the people in the scene must be seeing from their points of view when they photograph it. Without fully revealing where we stand. Related photographs in this group enact the kind of movements (whether real relocations of the photographer’s actual standpoint or imagistic reorganisations of the focus, visual angle, depth of field, and cropping of the photographs) that will be found throughout all the plates in the book. In no. 3846, for example, we “step back” to attain an even “higher” vantage, and look down from a slightly different angle; at the same time, we can see far more of the sea and the beach where “Mount Fuji” is located. In plate 9 (no. 3841), we seem to see the same scene from a vantage point about as third as close to the people (at least in part), and therefore that we must be seeing the scene at a different time – perhaps even on a different day.