For five straight months, four years in a row, for a total of 600 days, the Japanese artist Yu Yamauchi lived in a hut near the summit of Mt. Fuji. Every morning at dawn he took photographs of the rising sun, sky and clouds. If you ask me, that’s a cool project.
And the photographs are magnificent.
Yamauchi describes his vantage point at 10,000 feet above sea level as “the threshold between Earth and outer space.” The view, he says in a statement accompanying the photographs, is
“Constantly shifting,
the clouds look like a membrane encapsulating the Earth.
When the Sun rises behind a cloud-forming horizon,
the world that was painted in blue just a moment before
suddenly looks completely different.
I witnessed this magical transformation many times.”
What I find interesting about Yamauchi’s work–notwithstanding the breathtaking photographs themselves–is how it uses repetition as a generative tool. The art maintains a single vantage point and lets the weather of the passing days shape the content of what’s captured in Yamauchi’s lens. The photographer didn’t wait for the perfect day to shoot. Rather, each day he went to see what the rising sun, sky and clouds had to offer. The repetition and variations that mark time’s passing were their own kind of filter–stage one of a process.
You can view Yamauchi’s work here.
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