Fuji: Images of Contemporary Japan

Stark, mysterious, potent, looming, seductive, beautiful, iconic Mount Fuji. Overcommercialized, stereotypical, omnipresent, overcrowded Mount Fuji.

Typically seen as a backdrop to Japanese life — fishing, farming, religion, ceremony, urbanization, tourism — Chris Steele-Perkins offers a different frame to Japan's magical mountain.

The photographer spent three years shooting a 100 kilometer perimeter of the mountain. His mission was to capture as many coincidental images of Mount Fuji as possible — where the icon is often just an afterthought looming in the background.

For this project, Mr. Steele-Perkins was inspired by Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji — a book of woodprints his Japanese wife, Miyako, gave him as a gift.

Mr. Hokusai's prints showed Fuji as timeless and immune to the ever-growing industrialization and sprawl in Japan. This was not the Fuji Mr. Steele-Perkins saw.

Instead, he saw the mountain as part of a complex society. Intriguingly, he saw a place where aesthetic impulses and spiritual sentiments collide with the messy, pungent fact of humanity.

Mr. Steele-Perkins captures this collision of time — the past rushing full force into the future — from a careful outsider's view of Japanese society.

Fuji presents a different view of Japan's national symbol with clarity, diversity — and profound insight into Japanese culture.

About Chris Steele-Perkins

Chris Steele-Perkins was born a British citizen in occupied Burma in 1947 — and moved from Rangoon to London in 1949.

In 1970, he graduated with an honors degree in psychology from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne — where he worked as photographer and picture editor for the student newspaper. He began working as a freelance photographer immediately after and did his first foreign work in 1973.

Mr. Steele-Perkins is now an award-winning photographer based in London and Tokyo. He is a member of the Magnum Photos cooperative, founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

He has received some of the most prestigious awards in photojournalism, including the Tom Hopkinson Prize for British Photojournalism (1988), the Oscar Barnack Prize (1988) and the Robert Capa Gold Medal (1989).

He also earned the Cooperative Society and One World Award for the film, Dying for Publicity (1994) and a 2000 World Press Award.