Sorry for the sound of silence, been busy, out there, shooting, looking for pics, trying to keep the wolves from the door. Also been traveling a bit on assignment here in Japan and Korea.
Nipped down to Fukuoka for two photography assignments, and three bowls of the Japan famous Hakata tonkotsu ramen. Had a bowl in Ganso Nagahama, a great place to shoot images, such as this one I love of a kettle and ramen (taken on a previous trip).
Then the traveling continued, back to Tokyo, then down to Osaka for a corporate job. The same job also nicely took me all over Tokyo, and all round Yokohama on an absolutely stunning day- one of the best days of photography I’ve had in a while. I was up early, out, me and my ego and cameras, down to the waterfront. The light was sunny and clear, fresh but getting hot. The pcitures were everywhere, at every turn round, I nearly needed an assistant to shoot beside me the pics were coming so fast. And on my iPod a Boby Dylan concert, followed by a Van Morrison concert, both classics. A great day of shooting and listening and walking and looking.
Then it was over to Korea for the same corporate job, a wee look round Seoul where I’d actually never been before. That was good, bit wet, bit thunderstorms and grey clouds when the client needed sun, when I needed sun. Made life a bit tricky, but I think I made it work. Not much music listening there, too much to look at and shoot and explore. For all my Yokohama day with music was great, I’m not actually too into listening to music when I shoot, it’s too distracting.
And over in Korea, on a day off, I nipped up to the DMZ and had a look into North Korea, stepped into the Communist North for 3 minutes or so. But Kum Jung-Il was in Beijing, so I came back again.
And now, whilst I play catch up with business The Fader magazine, one of my favourites for it’s great design, layout and use of photography and typography, has run my Romanian roma portrait photographs on their website. They originally used it a while back in the magazine over 8 pages or so, but now in light of recent developments in France, with the expulsion of roma from the country, they’ve run it on their website. Please go take a look. Many thanks.
Many years ago after I won the Ian Parry Memorial Award I was able to squeeze my young self and fat folio through the door of The Sunday Times Magazine, squeeze in, past the answer machines, past the people who head you off at the gate. I got in, into Michael Rand’s room, into the inner sanctum. He was pleasant, courteous, and said I could leave my folio, he’d take a look.
So I did. I left my folio. A humble folio at that point, some Romanian work in it, the beginnings of my career in it. I left it hoping I’d get assignments for the iconic Sunday Times Magazine. I hoped I could get assignments which would take me all over the world.
But when you leave your folio with people, how do you ever know if it has been looked at ? Really. How do you know unless they comment on something within it. A lot of times you’d pick up the folio and people would just say “thanks, you’ve some nice pics. We’ll hopefully call you one day” Yeah. Sure ya will. Thanks. Maybe they did look, maybe they didn’t. Who knows. You hope.
But this time I left my folio in Michael Rand’s room, it was there for a few days or so. I hoped he’d look at it, in between laying out spreads of classic work by McCullin or Griffiths, or whoever. Hopefully.
Then I was told, sure come pick it up. Many thanks. And I took it outside, took a flick through it to see if he’d left an airplane ticket to some crazy country in it, but no. No ticket, no assignment sheet. No comments. But I did know he’d had a look. Or if it wasn’t Michael Rand himself, then someone had at least taken a look, that was a start. But how did I know ?
There, between two images, between two of the nice clean sleeves, so carefully presented and agonised over. There between two of my young fledgling folio hoping to make it in the world pages was the proof that it’d been looked at. A small measure of success, it’d at least been looked at. Yep, there it was. The proof.
A while back on this blog I wrote about my meeting with Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the intrepid explorer, adventurer, photographer, author and military man.
At that time I could not put my hands on the negatives of the portraits of Sir Wilfred Thesiger that I’d shot in his Sloane Square apartment. But now, a few months down the line, my ever getting better, ever shinier, ever more beautiful archive is looking trimmer, more immediate, more organised, more colourful, in panavision. It’s all being constantly stream lined, annotated, amalgamated, scanned, keyworded, sorted, cherished, loved, and now I can put my hands on what I need when I need it all from within Lightroom. Except for the trillion unscanned negatives of course.
So to follow up on my initial posting about Sir Wilfred Thesiger, here is the portrait I shot of him in his living room, on my Leica, on Tri-X or HP5. I shot a mere three frames of him. I was very happy to discover this image was used as the author portrait on Thesiger’s book ‘The Danakil Diaries‘.
A while back on this blog I wrote a little bit about the UK miners’ strike and imagery of coal mining. Ever since then I looked for a book of photographs from the period, depicting the strike, the battles and the hardship inflicted on communities. But I could never find one which I felt looked good, or fitted what I was looking for.
But recently I read about and then bought this new book, NO REDEMPTION by photographer Keith Pattison and writer David Peace. It looks the part, looks like a great document (I haven’t seen the actual book yet, only online).
To quote from the publishers website: “At the height of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, Keith Pattison spent six months living in the Durham coastal village of Easington Colliery and photographing the people there as events took shape. With the increasing determination of the government to break the strike and force miners back to work, he witnessed from the inside a community laid siege by the state.
Making what the documentary filmmaker John Grierson termed “creative use of actuality”, Pattison framed a narrative sequence of images: from the optimism of August, through the deepening pessimism of winter, right to the final vote to return to work.
Twenty-five years later, on Election Day 2010, Pattison took the writer David Peace to Easington to interview three of the people caught up in the strike – Alan Cummings, Marilyn Johnson and her husband Jimmy. Their memories, still freshly felt, make explicit the anger, pain, resilience and warmth captured in the photographs.”
I wrote to Keith and he told me that himself and David recently returned to Easington to the Miner’s Welfare club, to launch the book and also to show the work again to the community featured. David and two actors read the parts of the three people originally interviewed to the audience of 250. And members of the audience cried as the memory of it all came back.
A bit late with this post, but in some ways it is timeless.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Little explanation is needed of the cities, their whereabouts, or their history, and what happened to them in 1945.
In this the week of the 65th year anniversary of the nuclear bombings, I decided to take a look back over old and recent assignments I’ve undertaken covering the fate of those cities and the ‘hibakusha’, or nuclear bomb survivors/victims, that I’ve met and photographed. I’ve put together a small gallery set of assignment photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki cities, and the hibakusha I met. And included below, as much as I can, are some links to some of the stories by the journalists I worked with.
In July 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing, I travelled to Hiroshima for the Sunday Herald newspaper, with friend and journalist Torcuil Crichton (read his Hiroshima article here). Torcuil didn’t know Japan, and I didn’t know Hiroshima, but we went. We interviewed many people, explored the historical sites. Our first evening there, famished, we ate bread from a convenience store to take the edge of our hunger and then had sushi for dinner. Afterwards we stood on the bridge overlooking the Atomic Dome, and listened to the distant sound of a trumpet being played. We decided to track down the source of the music, we wandered over the bridge, down to the riverside near the Dome, and there we found Yoshitaka Shimizu. We listened, and I photographed as he played, then in a break, we spoke to him. He told us he came to the Dome to play his music for his dead grandmother to hear. His grandmother had survived the atomic bombing but died three years previously of spinal cancer. He told us his hero was Clifford Brown, the Blue Note trumpeter. The moment, and the images, seemed in journalistic fashion the perfect intro to the story we were to write and cover. Days later at the end of a great week of work together Torcuil was to ready return to Scotland, and as a parting gift he gave me a copy of Clifford Brown’s seminal album ‘Memorial’. To this day I play it, and think of that assignment week, of Torcuil and of the trumpeter playing beside the Dome.
Another person that Torcuil Chricton and I interviewed was the charismatic Sunao Tsuboi, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing (read his story via Torcuil’s link above). Heavily scarred by the bombing, but his enthusiasm for telling his story hadn’t waned. Tsuboi took us to Miyuki Bridge. There he showed us a large black and white photograph, one of only 5 surviving images taken by Japanese photographer Yoshito Matsushige in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 Hiroshima bombing. In the image, now a permanent fixture on the bridge , sits Sunao Tusboi. Thinking this was where he would die he etched into the stone “Tsuboi died here”. Sixty years later we stood there with him, as he explained the story and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ for us.
In 2005 I undertook many Hiroshima and Nagasaki related stories. A slightly unusual take on the history was covering the story of Shigeaki Mori, an historian and survivor of Hiroshima Atomic bombing, as he campaigned to add to the official list of Nagasaki bomb victims the name of British Royal Air Force Corporal Ronald Francis Shaw, of the RAF 84 Squadron. Corporal Shaw was killed in Nagasaki on 9th August 1945 in the atomic bombing, and is the only known British person to have died in either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. At the time when Richard Lloyd Parry of The Times and I met Shigeaki Mori he was searching to find any remaining relatives of Cpl. Shaw, and subsequently through our article he found them. Shaw’s name has now been added to the official list of bombing victims, and you can see an image of Shaw on the database of victims in the Nagasaki Museum. I photographed Shigeaki Mori in the beautifully kept Commonwealth War Cemetery, in Yokohama, beside a plaque bearing Corporal Shaw’s name. As I stood nearby, Mori-san was lost in thought, then slowly he dropped to his knees to pray.
Another slightly different take on the story was, again with good friend and colleague Richard Lloyd Parry of The Times, that of Motoharu Nakagawa in Kokura city. Kokura city was on the list of target cities for the bombing on 9th August, but due to fate and cloud cover, escaped being bombed. Instead ‘Bock’s Car’ flew on to Nagasaki to drop it’s deadly load there. Nakagawa-san was 8 years old in 1945, but he tells his story of seeing a US bomber flying above Kokura city on 9th August 1945, flying round and round in circles before flying off. Now he tells his story, not only of that day, but also of what would have happened to Kokura should the bomb have been dropped.
But perhaps the most remarkble stories I shot that year, in 2005, were those of ‘double hibakusha’, ie people who were unlucky enough to have been in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and lucky enough to have survived both bombings. I had never imagined such people existed, never imagined I’d get the chance to listen to their stories and testimony.
For The Observer I went to meet Kazuko Sadamaru who had survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It was to be a difficult assignment. Sadamaru had broken a self-imposed 60 year silence to talk to the Observer. She felt she had done her job as a nurse to help others and did not wish to bring attention to herself. I was driven to Sadamaru-san’s home, after the journalist had originally been there, but she refused to speak to us again. She had regretted doing the interview, and ow she had no desire to be photographed. I’d come a long way from Tokyo, I felt the image was important, but she was adamant, she did not wish to be photographed. We discussed it at length on the porch of her home, and finally she decided (perhaps in the hope that I’d leave) to let me photographing her nurse’s caps, the caps she’d worn on the days of the bombings, when she had proudly done her work to help other survivors.
Perhaps the most astonishing story that I covered in 2005 (and as I’ve mentioned before on this blog) is the story of Akira Iwanaga, Kuniyoshi Sato and Tsutomu Yamaguchi. The 3 gents were friends from Nagasaki, but in the last months of the war were sent to Hiroshima by their emlpoyer to work. On there last day in Hiroshima they were all caught by the bomb, but survived, and struggled home to Nagasaki. Only to be bombed again 3 days later. But again theyball survived and when I met them in 2005, 60 years after that awful week, they were still alive, and still friends. The story is best told by reading Richard Lloyd Parry’s article and interviews with the men, a story which won Richard a Foreign Correspondent of the Year award that year. (Due to The Times new paywall I can’t find the story on the Times site, but here it is here, on another website…). You can also read about Yamaguchi-san in a few other places, The Independent interview by David McNeill, The Guardian by Justin McCurry…). As I’ve mentioned before working on this story, the story of the three men, has been one of the most memorabvle and fascinating stories of my career.
And then last week, just before the 65th anniversary of the bombings I had an arduous day down to Hiroshima and Tokuyama to photograph two hibakusha. In Tokuyama my taxi delivered me to the worng danchi apartment block, in the mid day sweltering humid heat. I knocked on the worong door, made some phone calls, and finally made my way to the right apartment block, the correct door, and Kawamoto-san hanging out his window to guide me. Once inside, he handed me an ice coffee with condensation on the glass, a small sign of his generous and welcoming hospitable nature. Within a few minutes I was shooting his portrait as he applied his medicated ointments to his keloid scars. At the age of 17 he was caught in the Hiroshima bombing, but badly burned he survived. But as he explained to me, that one day changed his life. The scars he obtained that day, and the inumerbale operations since, have given him pain every day for the past 65 years. The pain he described as a needling pain boring through him every night. One day, but a lifetime of pain.
Another day, another tear sheet. As the old saying goes. This time for the quarterly Greenpeace International magazine for all supporters , and a very nicely clean, green, fresh designed magazine it is I’d like to add. My photograph of Toru Suzuki -one half of the Greenpeace Tokyo Two, (a portrait shot on assignment in Aomori, Japan on a freezing bitterly cold day), is on the cover of the latest issue of the magazine. You can download the magazine via the above link if you’d like to read more about what Greenpeace are up to these days, or if you’d just like a high resolution, crisper, cleaner photo of Toru.
A while back I was fortunate enough to be sent on photographic assignment, with behind the scenes access, at the Nissan car design centre in Hon Atsugi, just outside of Tokyo, Japan. Car design centres are not usually the types of places where photographers can wander at will snapping away, too many secrets waiting to be told and sold I imagine. And whilst this was a controlled visit, obviously, it was still rich with photographic opportunities. Before I went I dared hope for a couple of small clay models of cars, perhaps some sketches on a wall. Fingers crossed.
The design centre was a modern place, all white walls, glass, shafts of light, long corridors, funky graphics painted on the walls to illustrate the area or room you were in. And then a door was opened, a grey door, non descript, and the light flooded out. Inside was a clinically clean model making room, with workers putting the finishing touches to a lifesize clay model of the Nissan ‘Fairlady Z’ (admittedly a design which was already on the streets, but hey, it was big and right there) , and workers operating large computer generated sketch pad (that’s my technical term for it), all which I was allowed to shoot. An enjoyable visit, interesting, educational, and pretty good for photos. And the type of job that on your journey home, drinking your express train coffee, your mind is already thinking of the resale potential as a feature, and as stock, after your first client has used it.
