TRACKS

Not long ago, I posted two side-by-side images on Twitter. Almost immediately, a photographer in Japan came back with the comment, ‘Impressive. The Tokyo shot could be straight out of a Seijun Suzuki film.’

The compliment was too kind and undeserved but it did make me ponder on the comparison. Seijun Suzuki was a Japanese b-movie director - well not exactly. He was an auteur b-movie director, maverick, pain in the butt if you were a film studio, and a director who acted as an inspiration to the likes of Tarantino, and Jarmusch.

His visual style was said to be stark, at times washed out, angular and graphic. A style developed because the scripts he was given were mundane generic pot boilers and he wanted to create something distinctive. He shot in colour but also black and white.

Of course my efforts come nowhere close to his talent but the comment was the impetus to put together a portfolio to see if that style ran as a thread through my work. But only work that featured railways. That in itself was a challenge because I have never been a conscious photographer of railways. However going through my collection, I discovered to my surprise that I had sufficient images that I could group under the title Track to form the basis of a book.