The Japanese film festival is on again and this year one of the highlights is the documentary The Shoot Must Go On about the eighty year old Japanese photographer Sukita Masayoshi. Born in Nogata, a small mining town in Fukuoka prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Sukita moved to Osaka and became a photographer before moving to Tokyo. He was however to be drawn to London by his love of music and the emerging glam scene created by musicians like Marc Bolan – here of course he discovered the great inspiration of his life, David Bowie. There are the photos from 1972 of David at the Rainbow theatre and then later on, in Berlin and later on, on tour in New York. There are also the photographs of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Japan in 1977. There are lots of photos on the Hankyu train line between Osaka and Kyoto as well as photographs taken in and around the city of Kyoto that Bowie came to love. There are also photographs from the set for the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train and interviews with YMO whose album cover for Solid State Survivor was created on mahjong table at Sukita's studio. This game was big at the time so, in bright red uniforms designed by Takahashi Yukihiro, they sat down at the mahjong table but as there were only three of them Sukita brought in a human mannequin to be the fourth player.
Out of all his photographs, including the photographs of Bolan, Bowie and Iggy Pop not to mention a procession of various Japanese rock stars, it is a photo Sukita took of his mother sitting outside the family home in Nogata before going to participate in the local summer festival of which he is most proud. She is wearing a sedge hat and yukata, the profile is from the side and you can’t see her face. But this is the one photograph that he says brings together the best elements of his photography in a single image.
At age eighty Sukita is thinking of retiring. He might go back to Kyushu and live. In a 2016 shoot at the Royal Albert Hall he took photos of Iggy Pop's final tour for Post Pop Depression. Iggy stayed after the show for photos with the fans and he was praised in the media for turning the Albert Hall into an intimate club for the night. Sukita observed that in the early days photographing Bowie it was amazing how close the fans could get to him. There were shots of him performing in his underwear with the fans literally at his feet. By the eighties there were cameras with cranes going backwards and forwards in front of the stage and a huge distance had opened up between the performers and their audience. For Sukita who liked to photograph the interaction between the artist and their audience this was a cause for regret.
