This is a small post on twins…no nothing about real twins (but on my photo, I can’t be too sure but nevertheless…) its about two girls I found in Shinjuku. Two girls with equally obnoxious bows in their hair. I mean obnoxious…Incarnate Word HS obnoxious. Yet it was fashion…Doublemint Gum fashion yet they are probably not.
What do I know? It was hot. It was a busy day around Shinjuku. Its a moment.
A few weeks ago, the Washington Post commissioned me last month to spend the day with US Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii.
My memories of the Senator stretch back to eight grade when I first saw this one armed man on TV during the Iran-Contra hearing where he chaired a special committee investigating Reagan’s alleged affair in selling weapons to Iran via Israel to help fund the Contras in Nicaragua. From Wikipedia…Inouye stated the following:
“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.
How true his statement…
The Post was writing a profile piece on the aging Senator and writer Jason Horowitz and I followed Inouye for day in September. Much of the work was fairly generic…the Senator at a military ceremony, at a ground breaking…etc…nothing earth shattering. But most intriguing was a moment granted to us with the Senator and his wife at their condo in Waikiki.
The immaculately clean (and sterile) condo faced Waikiki with Diamond head towering in the background. I had humped along a sent of lights in the event I were to do a formal portrait but time dictated I needed to snap something very quick and catch a moment instead of formality. In most these cases, writers, especially staff writers, are prone to long interviews giving photographers very little time to take pictures. We only had an hour before the Senator was scheduled to attend a ground breaking ceremony for a project he helped fund federally.
I kept my cool with time as Jason engaged the Senator and got an earful of political history as Inouye “talked story” with us. Being the master politician he is, the Senator side-stepped, hopped, dodged, ignored…whatever you want to call it…any hard questions Jason threw at him. It was a graduate level course in politicking!
When I finally got a chance to capture the Senator’s likenesss, we walked out onto his balcony and I shot him overlooking his kingdom and the blue ocean beyond. Many of my shots I found to canned, rather, just to typical of what the Senator wanted me to see. Forced yet genuine smiles, an innocent man who accidentally had things go his way. I wasn’t too happy but I knew I got what he was going to give me. He knew how to interview and he knew how to control his image. His press aide was pushing us to wrap up and get out of the house. Oddly enough, the Senator, feeling good about the great banter between us and him, decided he wanted to show us around the condo. As the Senator’s wife showed Jason the bedroom, the Senator walked over the piano which sat as an art piece in the corner of his white carpeted condo.
He then sat down and was joking and laughing with us about only having one arm and owing a piano. He tragically lost his arm while fighting the Germans in WWII. He was telling us how back in rehab, the hospital would not let him out until he had mastered the use of his left arm. One of the drills was playing the piano. He masterfully plunked down on the ivory keys to play several songs including the melancholy Danny Boy. He laughed and giggled as a kid as he played tunes from his youth all the while his wife, Irene Hirano, glowed besides him. The eastern facing windows gently filled the room giving me the perfect setting.
Moments like this don’t happen often and I had fired off probably 80 to 100 shots before time was up. As I look back at the shots, I realize how no matter what I had planned with lighting, etc… for my portrait, the best images are never planned. Decisively, as Cartier Bresson might say, I captured a brief moment of a long life.
You can read the article here.
Here is my showcased signed cover by Chef Morimoto. No one can seem to make out what he wrote. Can any of you read enough Japanese scribble to figure out what he wrote?
I love the mustache.
Sorry I’ve been away…shooting and editing several jobs and sorting through the thousands of images from Japan. I found this one worthy of a quick, late night blog…
While on the train to Hiroshima one morning, I spied a commuter reading the sports pages of a local paper. Yukako said the headlines were something like…”when I licked the ice cream stick, it melted…” referring to, well, eating ice cream naked in bed on the back of the sports pages. Ah, Japan…what covers for news is much more exciting that what we have in the West, no?
Hey…I just noticed a phantom hand on her back. HEY LEAVE HER ALONE! THAT’S HER ICE CREAM STICK.
Anyway, a quick note on the bw file and camera used. I shot loads with a new Panasonic DMC-LX3 point-n-shoot camera. It shoots raw files and does a fine job for what its meant to do. Its crappy low light but does a great job in just about most other situations. Has a Leica 35mm 2.0 lens and a cute little flash. Does the trick in a pinch and even does video. I did lots of stuff in Japan with this camera. The bw file was a setting in the camera and it isn’t all that bad. I would hope to one day have a point and shoot that can do really good low light stuff but thats a dream.
Kodak is actually reporting that film is making a comeback with the hip young kids these days. Maybe I’ll go back to the trouble. Haven’t shot film in a while.
Next post…Morimoto!
Japan is really hot in the summer. Unbearable. Even the locals said the summer heat was the worst in years. Little did I know I would encounter weather so bad.
It was really hot. Anyway…I traveled to Japan this past August for a guidebook and photographed just about every tourist site in 13 cities across southern Japan including Tokyo. I flew into Tokyo and traveled to Shimonoseki, Hiroshima, Kurashiki, Kobe, Osaka, Nara, Kyoto, and Nagoya. Spend a few days in Tokyo and decided (and was pushed by an aggressive editor) to go back to Kyushu and covered Fukuoka, Kagoshima, and Kuamamoto. I spent loads of time staring out the window of the Shinkansen bullet train watching the world blur by.
I’ve been to Japan many times in the past for both pleasure and family as well as work. I shot my way across the Noto Peninsula for a bicycling magazine and I’ve done many a project on my own throughout Tokyo and surrounding areas. Japan isn’t new to me but its always an adventure. Karaoke (yes, I sang), hot baths (no…too darn hot), rotating sushi bars (pretty cool), sake (need you ask), yukatas (if I can find one that fits) and Godzilla (grrrrr!) But this trip wasn’t just about badly howling Frank Sinatra songs and tossing empty beer cans into the street because heaven forbid the Japanese make throwing trash away easy…it was about taking pictures…and let me tell you I took some pictures. I think I captured on an average about 2000 images a day and that equals about 50,000 images…and thats on the conservative side.
Seems all I did was have my face buried behind my camera snapping away. And when I wasn’t taking a picture, I spent most of my Tokyo time (and for that matter in every city I traveled to) drinking Pocari Sweat, the Japanese version of Gatorade (and neither taste better than the other) while standing and sweating over a vending machine. The heat and humidity just about killed me. On one of my last days in Kyushu, I just about fell to heat exhaustion. I don’t think I’ve ever been that hot. Not even after a tough workout class with my iron-butt trainer have I had salt stains ring my shirts and socks that seemed as if they came out of a washing machine.
So I was a hot, sweaty travel photographer. Glamorous? Well, I got to travel to these exotic and foreign destinations visiting tourists spots and restaurants but its hard to enjoy. You are there to capture, as best as you can, the essence and feeling of that location, the taste of this food, or the peace in that temple. All of this has to be done on a frame or two and done within an extreme short period of time. In most cities, I had only a day or two to cover what most tourists would cover in a week. I mean from train station to museum to park to castle to museum to restaurant to store to museum to temple to shrine to restaurant to scenic area to historic spot to statue to ferry to train to bus to hotel and so forth all the while you’re deciphering a map written in Japanese hoping for a moment of brilliance that never comes. From sunrise to sundown for close to a month. You get very little sleep, rest, or time to enjoy anything. And talk about the walking. I walked so much I wore the rubber off my new Lacoste sneakers within the first two weeks. And did I mention the heat?
There is also the amount of equipment I have to carry. Multiple cameras, lenses, laptop, cords, cases, hard drives, more cords, flash cards, cases, bags, zip locks, and even more cords. Also clothes. Its not fun. The fact that you are always fearing a hard drive (although I had four of them) would go down loosing thousands of images is enough to make you stay up at night. It was no different in the old days with film but digital seems to be tougher as there is just so many more accessories to carry around. You could still in one way or another loose your film. In my college days, I back packed through Central America and Southeast Asia. I carried a film camera, a few lenses, and a few rolls of film. Once my kit (camera, film, passport, etc..) got left behind at a bus station in Saigon because a porter forgot to load it onto our bus. It arrived the next day, no problems asked. I sweated that one. Now…its a different story. Way too much on the line. Yet, today I feel like I am just a walking byte.
You also have to do all the logistics and planning, deal with the language barriers, read maps and outdated guidebooks, try to communicate with unfriendly locals who don’t want their picture taken. Cloudy weather when you need sun, dirty clothes that need a wash, and raincoats that never fold small enough to carry comfortably. Train schedules, flights, tickets, overhead baggage. Odd sized money, coins, vending machines, strange foods… travel photography isn’t what you think it is. Its not walking up an noon with a foreign beer hangover and going to make epic photos of a group of monks at an ancient temple. Its waking up at 5am with a foreign beer hangover hoping some monk won’t scream bloody hell at you because you forgot to take off your shoes when you entered…or how you walked in circles trying to find some obscure cafe some writer wrote about but never went to…or trying to explain to someone who doesn’t speak English who doesn’t understand my bad Japanese or pantomime hoping they’d explain where the hell I am on a map that isn’t written in English.
Travel is tough.