Burt Glinn | Magnum Photos Full moonrise over Mount Fuji viewed from Mount Sichimen. Mount Fuji, Japan. 1961.
“Burt believed that, as a photographer, when going on a journey to another country, never mind maps and travel
(...) books, it was essential to read the writers of the period, and look at the artists of the period. For Japan, the painters and printmakers were key: Hokusai, Hiroshige.
Later in life, he collaborated with the writer Laurens van der Post to produce the beautiful book, A Portrait of Japan. The book is a compilation of Laurens’ prose and Burt’s images. Laurens’ musings on Mt. Fuji recall the spiritual element that is also ubiquitous in Burt’s images of Japan, particularly this shot of Mt. Fuji. ‘These mountains in their size and in their forbidding nature provoke a special type of human being to take up the challenge. In the process of overcoming them, he conquers something in himself, and the achievement, however undefined and irrational, is not to be underrated. But Fuji draws to itself more the pilgrim than the mountaineer because it is the mountain not of challenge but of resolution’ (A Portrait of Japan, Hogarth, 1968).”
- Elena Glinn © Burt Glinn | Magnum Photos
