C H A L L E N G E R

The HMS Challenger was a research vessel provisioned by the Royal Navy that voyaged around the world between 1872 and 1876. Primarily, its mission was to conduct scientific research on the oceans but it had a second objective to record the societies and their environments that it encountered with photography. On its voyage, it called into the port of Yokohama on the 11th April and proceeded to stay in Japan for 2 months. There it enjoyed the most pleasant of all its port of calls and recorded the landscape of a country that would soon be gripped fully by industrialization. For centuries the Japanese society were believed to have lived in balance with their landscape but the consequences of the industrialization left an impression on the landscape in such a dramatic way so as to distort that balance in the name of progress. The focus of this project is to create a body of work that investigates the problematic Japanese landscape whilst drawing parallels with contemporary issues surrounding digital photography.