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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how Suzuki Risaku’s photographs in Mont Sainte Victoire, entitled after Paul Cézanne’s landscape paintings, offer a space experienced by a human body as Suzuki assumes the position of being-in-the-world or being-with-an-environment, not of one cutting and naming landscape.

Paper long abstract:

Suzuki Risaku’s book Mont Sainte Victoire (Nazraeli, 2004) collects 43 colour photographs taken across the areas of the eponymous mountain near Aix-en-Provence, France, made famous by Paul Cézanne’s paintings under the same title. In the method established in his earlier photo books, such as Kumano, Suzuki traces the French artist’s footsteps rather than representing the iconic views of the mountain after his predecessor’s vision. The Japanese photographer’s frames rarely capture the recognizable shape of the mountain but are instead occupied by the red dirt he is to tread and by pine trees that grow in various directions and block his line of sight. His pictures remind the viewer of the air that flows through and stagnates in the space, and of the sound shoes make on gravel. Although located outdoors, as Cézanne was, Suzuki’s experience is far from that of the painter en plein air—seated at a viewpoint guaranteed to command a perfect view of the object to be depicted—his steps revealing instead the impossibility of finding the ideal vista of the mountain. Whether evoking confusion or hallucination, frustration with the prolonged quest or the delight of distraction, Suzuki’s pictures show moments in a journey not of the eye/mind but of a fully fleshed, multisensorial body with (or as) the prosthesis of the photographic camera. His takes are both as incidental as snapshots and as deliberate as art photographs, vernacular yet designed through studying and remembering Cézanne’s paintings. Neither landscape nor tourism photography, Suzuki’s images do not perpetuate and verify topoi, as do The 53 Stops on the Tôkaidô by Utagawa Hiroshige and The 36 Views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai. This paper shows how Suzuki’s photographs, devoid of any sign of a human figure, offer space experienced (Lefebvre) by a human body and invite viewers to immerse themselves in the somatic and ecological space, rather than connoisseurially consuming a codified landscape. Suzuki assumes the position of being-in-the-world or being-with an environment—exploring not conquering, absorbing not piercing, and communicating with space-time rather than cutting and naming landscape.