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.
