"I love contemporary art, I like a lot of conceptual art. I've followed it for years, endlessly. I mean where do you want to start really?" asks Andy Summers in an interview conducted last week. "I spent quite a few years painting and all I did was think about art and go to museums. I was enmeshed in all of it. But I finally felt that doing photography was what I really enjoyed."
Summers is best known as the guitarist for The Police, but he was in Tokyo for "Desirer Walks the Streets," an exhibition of his photography that is showing through next Monday at the BLD gallery in Ginza. The show coincides with the launch of a book of the same title (published by musician Nagato Ishiwata's company, Shuppan-Kyodo) that features 200 of Summers' art photographs. When The Police went back on tour in 2007, he released "I'll Be Watching You: Inside the Police, 1980-83," but this time, the last thing Summers is doing is documenting any musical era.
"I told The Daily Telegraph in London — 'cause they were like 'Oh, it's reportage' — No, it's the opposite," says Summers. "It's the absolute opposite — it's Surrealism. For me it is juxtaposing these different things and playing them off each other in a formal sense: shape, black, white, shape, and subject matter as well, to create this Surrealist dream."