Sunday morning, reading the papers. Well, the internet really. I found this blog on The Times, and in particular, the entry “The Florence Nightingale Award”. It’s worth a read, it’s humourous in parts in the comments. Anyway, the blog asks “who have you shaken hands with ?” Along the lines of ‘I shook hands with so-and-so and he shook hands with Hitler, therefore i’m two steps from Hitler’.
As a photographer working in the press you get to shake hands with a lot of the great, the good and the ugly. The handshake game would be an easy one to impress with. But the reason I write all this is that there is this line from the author: “My favourite entry? Seb Coe said that he had shaken hands with Jesse Owens, who didn’t shake hands with Hitler.”

This anecdote made me think of a story of my own….a couple of years ago I met Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese author, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. We were in his garden in Tokyo and I was photographing him for a UK newspaper. Oe-san told me that as a young man he had once been in a room in Beijing with Mao Tse-Tung, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and…. Henri Cartier-Bresson who was photographing. I mentioned that I’d once met HCB, and I asked Oe-san did Cartier-Bresson photograph you? Oe-san laughed and replied (along the lines of) “no, i was young and not important enough, there were more important people in the room”.

The story made me smile, Cartier-Bresson could have photographed a future Nobel Prize winner, but didn’t, he missed a chance for a good pic. But saying that I’d love to see the contact sheets from that shoot, to see if Oe-san is in any of the pics from that room.