Somebody somewhere once said, “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.” In actual fact, it’s probably one of those quotes that no one ever actually said but that everyone simply accepts. Like, “Beam me up Scotty;” these words were never actually uttered by the good Captain James T. Kirk, apparently, yet ask anyone in the street and they’ll guarantee you’re wrong. They’ll lay money on it. Or they’ll simply shrug and walk away, checking anxiously behind them to see if you’re following.
So is it? Stranger than fiction. Well, we at Defunktion think not. Fiction, we would argue can be pretty damn strange. Take the work of decidedly lunatic Frenchman Georges Perec for example. For those unfamiliar with his madness, his novel A Void consists of a wildly creative narrative written in French without ever once using the letter “e.” This is a completely normal novel in every other sense, it has a story, and a good one at that. It has characters and events and everything else you’d expect. Just no “e’s.” Quite strange n’est-ce pas?
So what of truth? How strange is truth in general? Well, not very. It’s true, for example, that the harder you kick a can of coke, the further it will travel. Yet, that’s not particularly strange. It’s also true that sewage systems are boring. Except that they aren’t. Drainage systems are staggeringly beautiful and interesting things. A bold claim, but one that we at Defunktion are ready to make, now that we’ve seen the G-Cans Project.
Whomever is responsible for this subterranean-tour-de-force has a very fine eye for composition, coupled with a subtlety of touch probably not encountered that often in the humdrum world of water drainage. These sci-fi worlds seem to have been plucked straight out of Blade Runner; perfectly illustrating that photography can be at once ordinary and sublime. The subterranean spaces are lovingly shot, the light in each exquisitely revealing detail where required and throwing masks of darkness across to intensify drama.
This is photography that makes us look again at the ordinary, that makes us approach and question the aesthetic of the world around us in entirely different ways. So what’s the stranger? The world as it truthfully is, or the world as we imagine it to be? Well surely they’re both the same thing after all…
The G-Cans Project can be , or, for more adventurous readers in Tokyo, there are free live tours available (note that one of your tour group must be able to speak Japanese).
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