Behind the scenes: Too Much magazine

Founded in 2011, Too Much is a Tokyo-based magazine of ‘romantic geography’ that aims to explore our collective experience of cities, and the interaction between people and landscapes. The current issue is the first in a series titled ‘Work’, and is made up entirely of words and pictures provided by mountaineer and photographer Naoki Ishikawa, based on his expeditions in the Himalayas.

I asked editors Yoshi Tsujimura (top, left), Audrey Fondecave (top, right), Cameron Allan McKean (bottom, right) and designer Akinobu Maeda (bottom, left) to tell me about the new series, and how the issue came about.

What’s the idea behind Too Much?
Tokyo is spatially shocking. Living in compact spaces, never being able to see the line of the horizon, being surrounded by tens of millions of people and navigating through it all can change people. There are many ways of dealing with the experience of a megacity; we decided to make a magazine.

Too Much is about ‘romantic geography’ – how do you define the term?
For us, romantic geography is about looking at our experience of the landscape through personal experiences, stories and reflections. We explore the relations between structures, landscapes and people not through science and academia, but through experiences. We want our readers to think about their own relationship to spaces; how they’re influenced by the landscape they’re surrounded by, and vice versa.

What’s your personal relationship to nature (or perhaps the lack of it)?
Tokyo is full of parks and gardens – the metropolitan government plans to double the greenery in the city over the coming years – and it’s a city with a lot of water; canals and rivers running through it. But all this “nature” is abstracted. Everything is manmade; it has been planted, controlled or concreted. Even the horizon; you can only see it from the top floors of skyscrapers, and even then all you see is urban sprawl, with manicured pockets of green here and there.

Because of that, the natural elements can feel a bit like another kind of infrastructure. Nature becomes atmospheric – bird sounds are played in subway stations; or it’s functional – parks are firebreaks or hide supplies to be distributed in the event of a disaster.

Your latest issue is part of a new series titled Work – what’s the idea behind the series?
The decision to make a series about Work was made a long time ago. We wanted to be able to work more closely with individual artists and feature their work in a more dedicated way than a traditional feature article would allow. Over the years we have had the chance to work with many talented artists and Work is a way to create something more substantial from the collaborations.

With the series, we want to think about the effect we have on landscapes and built environment – how is it a resource, and how do artists and architects use it?

How did the collaboration with Naoki Ishikawa come about?
We’ve been working with Naoki since the second issue of Too Much, and we’ve also done a lot of events with him, presenting his work in galleries in Tokyo. What was interesting for us was not only Naoki’s experience of the mountains, but his commitment to the communities living there, like his knowledge of the Sherpas.

The issue is completely made up of Naoki’s words and images – how did you edit the material?
It’s a lot of material, covering six years of Naoki’s life and a dozen trips to the Himalayas. He gave us a box containing about 3,000 prints, which we edited down to 300. For the text, we used a journal he kept.

Each of Naoki’s trips to the Himalayas lasted for around three months, and he wrote every day. We only kept the sections where he wrote about summiting each peak, and we translated them. The interview with mountaineer Russell Brice was done by Naoki himself – the recording of their conversation is about seven hours long, and we had to cut it down to eight pages. It was important for us while editing to find a specific way to show each travel experience, to communicate the individuality of each location, each mountain.

Do you have a set number of issues planned for the Work series? How much can you tell me about the next issue?
The plan with the Work series is to publish one every two issues. The idea is to not only feature photographers, but a wider range of artists.

The next issue, which we are in the process of making now, is based on the idea of shelter.

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