Vantage Point ©Daniel Everett and Marten Lange

Written by Ari Adams

Photo edited by Melike Ahsen Beleli

Photographers have long had a tendency to work as lone wolves. While photographers—specifically those working in the realm of fashion and editorial photography—have a long history of hiring assistants and teams to help create their vision for an image, it has nearly always been in service of achieving their singular vision and the collaboration that may or may not happen on set is rarely acknowledged. In other worlds of photography outside of fashion and editorial, photographers who have documented similar topics and subjects have often met each other with combativeness. In the case of Vantage Point, a new book by Mårten Lange and Daniel Everett, the two photographers have completely foregone the tendency to work as singular and combative artists and have embraced collaboration whole-heartedly. The resulting book provides viewers with beautiful architectural imagery but also—possibly more interestingly—provides them with a book that details the visual dialogue between the two photographers who approach the same subject matter in different manners.

The book is the product of a chance encounter between Lange and Everett, a Swedish and American photographer, respectively. While attending an exhibition in 2016 of Everett’s book Throughout the Universe in Perpetuity, Lange realized that one of Everetts images was remarkably similar to one of his own. It turned out that the two photographers had taken the same image of the same building from the exact same vantage point in Tokyo. The two photographers proceeded to collaborate together, compiling their personal images from different trips to Japan, which they compiled into their new book, Vantage Point.

The images in Vantage Point are architectural in their purest form. The images focus on the small details of buildings and their life under construction to the grandiosity and immensity of individual buildings and the fusion of many, respectively. As an amalgamation, the images represent various Japanese cities as densely populated, ultra-modern metropolises that are dominated by business, construction, and electrical infrastructure. Despite the population density that is implied through the appearance of massive skyrise buildings which jut out of the ground one-after-another, the human presence is quite diminished in the images present in the book, setting the photographs—which focus heavily on façades and construction site—apart from those which the general populace has used to come to know Japanese cities from afar and depict Japanese cities as filled to the brim with human presence. On the other hand, the images that make up Vantage Point depict Japanese cities as nearly empty, making them unique amongst the crowd of prior photographic projects depicting city life in Japan.

But the images that make up Vantage Point do much more than depict a specific view of the Japanese city. The images call into question the idea of originality in a world defined by image makers and visual storytelling. By focusing on the same city through a similar lens, the images that share dialogue throughout the book create both a harmonic and dissonant conversation about not only the human mind but the power of the camera and the concept of an artist. What creates value in a photograph? How unique is each and every individual, really? These are the questions that Vantage Point leaves you pondering upon its first read and upon its subsequent reads, will only leave you with questions which become deeper and evermore philosophical about the human experience and its relationship to art in the modern world.