Drew Pettifer, Mount Fuji, Photography, 2013
Summary
Photography is the medium in which Melbourne-based artist and academic Drew Pettifer works, with a practice that is typically concerned with issues of sexuality, masculinity, vulnerability and the gaze.
In this C-type photograph, ‘Untitled (Mount Fuji)’, taken in 2013, Pettifer captures the fine balance between stillness and speed, between the deep-time of the past and rapid time of the present. The photograph was taken as he rode the shinkasen, the bullet train, past this most recognisable symbol of Japan. Unlike the 1960 work of the same title by American painter Georgia O’Keefe, in which Mount Fuji rises from an abstracted minimalist landscape, unfettered by signs of human occupation, Pettifer’s documentary and yet introspective photograph is of a land overwritten with signs human life and intervention.
‘Untitled (Mount Fuji)’ was printed as an edition of five and purchased for the Art and Heritage Collection at the 2014 annual West Space fundraiser exhibition.
