Shinjuku To Mt Fuji

Mount Fuji breaks the horizon beneath a sky bruised orange and deep purple, its silhouette rising above the full spread of Tokyo at dusk. Illuminated towers push into the foreground, their glass facades lit from within, and a factory chimney on the far right releases a slow plume against the fading light. From a high vantage above Shinjuku the city stretches without interruption to the foot of the volcano.

The eight-second exposure holds the city lights steady at the moment the sky still carries colour, and Fuji reads as a single clean line at the back of a very crowded foreground. The mountain sits roughly 100 kilometres from the vantage, reduced to a clean profile by that distance and by the city's haze. Fuji is both a sacred site and a working stratovolcano: its most recent eruptive activity was the Hoei event of 1707 to 1708, and it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a cultural site on 22 June 2013. Brett photographed this on 31 January 2012, on the Nikon D7000 he was shooting at the time. Tokyo runs unbroken to the horizon, and the older and larger fact sits behind all of it.