BRUNO QUINQUET VISITED MOUNT FUJI, Japan’s highest peak and most iconic landmark, in October 2006, soon after moving to Japan for a break from his work as a recording engineer in France. Wandering through the forests that surround the mountain with his nephew, he caught a sudden glimpse of a man, all alone, walking quickly through the trees, carrying a briefcase and wearing a business suit. Quinquet was struck hard by the contrast between the urban and the natural in the scene, and by the sense of mystery that surrounded this solitary office worker. He snapped a hurried picture, and the man disappeared.
The photo came out badly, Quinquet said, but the image lingered in his mind—and from it sprouted what, over the next eight years, would become the Salaryman Project: his series on the corporate peons who fuelled Japan’s post-war rise, but are being left behind by new economic currents. Far from an expert photographer when he started the project, Quinquet experimented with a small digital camera for a few months before enrolling to study photography at the Tokyo Visual Arts School, where he continued to work with the same simple machine. The medium, he found, suited his situation: living in a new country, lacking the linguistic and cultural familiarity necessary to communicate verbally, yet observant, and eager to engage with all that was around him. “Being introverted and interested in the outside world at the same time,” he explained, “I found with photography an activity that gives me the right balance of contemplation and interaction.”
With the salaryman already in mind as a subject, Quinquet proceeded by establishing strict formal boundaries. Like a poet writing a haiku, he sought freedom through fixedness. He decided that each photo would feature a single man, captured in a way that would leave him unrecognisable. Keeping in mind the “very sharp sense of the season” cultivated by the Japanese, he also resolved to include prominent seasonal markers, echoing the kigo—words associated with particular seasons—considered de rigueur in haikus. Quinquet shot almost the entire project, which he completed last year, on point-and-shoot digital cameras.
The resulting photos capture the absurdities and pathos of the salaryman’s life through obliqueness and misdirection. Quinquet’s subjects appear faceless standing behind a flowering cherry tree, or obscured by steam rising from a soup bowl. Though they wear suits and collared shirts, they are not at work, but just going about daily routines: riding the train, sitting in a park, window-shopping, alone. “Men are supposedly the masters of this patriarchal society,” Quinquet said, “but the average guy seems quite powerless.” A wry humour also comes through. In presenting his work, Quinquet published appointment diaries that feature diptychs of his images, paired by matching, season-specific colours.
The Salaryman Project is neither satire nor documentary. Quinquet does not show the salarymen as we would expect to see them—in rows of cubicles inside modernist skyscrapers, typing away. Nor does he stage explicitly humorous scenes; there are no photos of salarymen sprawled on beaches or cavorting atop mountain peaks. Instead, he combines these two approaches to capture the peculiar in-betweenness of salarymen: individual yet anonymous, unique yet representative of an entire stereotyped class, serious yet tragically funny. There is empathy in this, rather than cruelty. “If I were I born Japanese,” Quinquet said, “chances are that I’d become a salaryman.”