Agent Orange - Philip Jones Griffiths

Agent Orange

Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths first heard about the dangers of Agent Orange (the highly toxic herbicide used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War) in Saigon in 1967. "During the war there were these rumours that babies were being born without eyes and it became a quest to find them," says Griffiths. "I visited as many catholic orphanages as I could, but I was barred entry from most of them and I became convinced that the Americans had put the word out - don't let any press in."

Griffiths, now aged 67, worked as a freelance during the Vietnam War, but though an associate member of Magnum, he had little financial success. It was only with the publication of Vietnam Inc. (Griffiths' book on the failings of the American war machine) in 1971, that his photography reached a wider audience. But the critical tone of Vietnam Inc. meant Griffiths was banned from re-entering Vietnam. He didn't return until 1980, when he met victims of Agent Orange for the first time. Over the next 20 years, he would photograph some of Vietnam's estimated 1 million victims, building a body of work now published as Agent Orange, a harsh and uncompromising examination of the legacy left by US chemical spraying of the Vietnamese landscape.

Griffiths first encounter with Agent Orange victims happened almost by chance. "We were travelling by road from Hanoi to Saigon and we started talking about Agent Orange. The driver said, well there's this family with two blind daughters - we'll probably see them tomorrow." "It was very emotional. The husband had been a truck driver on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (transporting supplies to the Vietcong in the South) and he was very proud of what he did - and there was a strange ambivalence between the pride of the family and this disaster that had struck them. Those two blind girls were the first ones I ever saw."

Agent Orange was one of a series of colour-coded agents known as the Rainbow herbicides. They were first sprayed on crops as part of a "Food Denial Program" designed to force reluctant villagers into 'strategic hamlets'. When this proved ineffective, defoliation was used in Operation Ranch Hand to deny enemy forces jungle and forest cover.

Spraying increased in intensity throughout the 1960s, to become what Yale University botany Professor, Arthur Galston called "the largest chemical warfare operation in history." But even though Vietnam's forests and hilltops were laid bare, spraying was widely recognised as both militarily and psychologically ineffective.

As the Americans continued spraying, indications of the toxicity of Agent Orange and its deadly contaminant of dioxin became evident. "I think the earliest indications that Agent Orange was harmful were when people came down with chloracne at some of the companies who were making it," says Griffiths. By 1969, "...tests revealed that as little as two parts of dioxin per trillion in the bloodstream was sufficient to cause deaths and abnormal births in laboratory animals."

A by-product of chlorine production, dioxin works as an "environmental hormone." It causes disastrous changes at a hormonal and genetic level - causing diseases and deformities ranging from Hodgkins disease and diabetes to spina bifida and leukaemia. Because these diseases also occur naturally, and because there is reluctance on the part of chemical companies and the US government to admit liability, there is no universally recognised causative link between dioxin and many of its associated diseases.

“The connection between Agent Orange exposure and associated diseases is accepted by the majority of scientists who work in the field,” says Dr Arnold Schechter, a professor at the University of Texas who is researching the health effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, “but there is resistance to connecting Agent Orange to some diseases when litigation is involved. Industry groups will try to minimise the health damage.”

It’s a view confirmed by Dr Steven Stellman of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “Unquestionably there has been a tremendous amount of resistance to recognising diseases caused by Agent Orange. The US federal governement has resisted for years, and it has been very difficult to get studies going and very little research has been funded.”

Another problem is put forward by Dr Wayne Dwernychuk of Hatfield Consultants. “Western epidemiologists do not feel that the scientific rigour of the Vietnamese studies meet western criteria in terms of experimental design and analysis. Dr. Phuong, Director of the Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City has witnessed first hand the birth defects issue as it pertains to highly exposed populations. She has followed this for over 30 years and is absolutely convinced the relationship is there. The US government's position has been that no unequivocal evidence exists which proves a firm link between exposure and expression of birth defects and health issues in Vietnam. However, the US Dept. of Veteran's Affairs provides financial compensation to US Vietnam veterans for certain diseases if they can show they were exposed to Agent Orange during their tours of duty. Spina Bifida, a birth defect in children of US Vietnam veterans, is covered by Veteran's Affairs ... but not for victims in Vietnam.”

Griffiths began documenting the full horrors of the genetic effects of Agent Orange at Tu Du Hospital in Saigon. "I went in and it was this dark room filled with all these deformed foetuses." Griffiths photographed conjoined twins, collapsed skulls and twisted spines, yet somehow he photographed these dead babies with a gentle tenderness. "I tried to give them some humanity," he explains. "Some are hugging or embracing. I didn't want to turn it into a freak show.”

As Griffiths continued to photograph, the full scale of Vietnam's tragedy became apparent to him. In 1998 he visited Cam Nghia, a village where 10% of children were born with serious deformities. "Cam Nghia had the highest number of abnormalities in Vietnam, but what you're not told is that in the majority of cases the foetus doesn't even develop. And then there are miscarriages and live births dying within 48 hours."

In 1971, the use of Agent Orange officially ceased in Vietnam, but its contaminant of dioxin is still claiming fresh victims today. "The toxicity is so great that once it is in your body, you can't get rid of it. The exception of course is lactating mothers who can pass it out through their milk to their children. Now they're finding concentrations of dioxin in the sediment of this fishpond where the levels are the highest they have recorded in the world, and yet the people are still eating the fish from there. Anywhere else in the world people would be moved out and the earth would be put into plastic bags taken away and buried".

Griffiths believes Vietnam presents a unique, and missed, opportunity to study what happens to victims of dioxin. "You've got people who are culturally and ethnically identical living around Vietnam. Only the south was sprayed - the north wasn't sprayed, so you've got your control group there and it gives a wonderful opportunity. But almost the only company that are doing major research are Hatfield Consultants of Canada who are doing a lot of good work." Research undertaken by Hatfield includes an assessment of dioxin residues on parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the correlation between continuing birth defects in villages and their proximity to former US Special Forces bases with high levels of dioxin contamination.

American veterans are still suffering from Agent Orange exposure, and are seeking compensation above and beyond the 1984 settlement of US $180 million (though no admission of liability) won from chemical companies that produced Agent Orange.

The Vietnamese have never received any compensation for the chemical warfare visited upon them. Instead they have an inheritance of death and deformity. Philip Jones Griffiths' Agent Orange is a devastating record of these victims of chemical warfare.

--End --

Pablo Escobar

A Myth in His Own Making




“As a child, he loved nature and animals,” says Dona Hermilda, the mother of Columbian drug dealer, Pablo Escobar. “He loved trees from a very early age. He nearly cried when his father had to chop them down.”

Pablo Escobar was not so sensitive when it came to people. His rise from small-time gangster to the world’s biggest drug dealer was accompanied by a level of violence that brought Colombia to a state verging on civil war. He was responsible for killing half the nation’s Supreme Court and blowing an airliner out of the sky, he murdered politicians, journalists and police at will and transformed his home town of Medellin into the world’s most dangerous city. In 1991, he walked out of a prison he had built for himself and spent the next 2 years on the run. He escaped over 14,000 police raids before his death in 1993, shot by Colombian police on the rooftop of a safe house in Medellin.

James Mollison’s latest work, Pablo Escobar, is a visual examination of the life and times of Escobar. Tying in images from a variety of archives with a text, the book provides a visual overview of a man who was once America’s Public Enemy Number One.

“I was in Colombia and I was doing this Narcotecture project,” says Mollison. “I got excited about it because of the idea and name. People would tell me about buildings made from drug money which had swimming pools instead of balconies, but then I got there and there would be nothing interesting to photograph. The buildings were boring.”

“I was depressed about it, but I was photographing in Medellin and was in the process of going to an old Escobar office block called Edifacio Monaco - which only confirmed that the project didn’t work. The building was occupied by Columbia’s public prosecution service, I was apprehended by security and had my camera confiscated. I was taken to meet the boss whose office was in Escobar’s old bedroom. He was so excited by this and brought out this whole book of photographs. Seeing this record really threw me because other books on Pablo Escobar have a US perspective but the images I saw were gritty and not glamorous. I wanted to know how Escobar had got into this position.”

Mollison returned to Columbia 6 months later and set about searching for visual records of Escobar’s life, not an easy task considering many pictures had disappeared or been destroyed - Escobar paid the police to destroy their files and the mass media were not much help either. Most journalists who were brave enough to tell the truth about Escobar were killed. Escobar closed down Colombia’s second biggest daily, El Espectador, by killing its editor, bombing its offices and forcing advertisers to withdraw their patronage. However, the bravery of El Espectador’s journalists shows in the archive they held on the activities of Escobar and his associates.

The El Espectador archive forms the heart of Mollison’s book, its black and white images detailing the height of Escobar’s sociopathic terror against Colombian society.

“One thing I came to understand was Pablo was obsessed with power,” says Mollison. “He was a classic gangster. He wasn’t really a drug smuggler, but he was born in the right place at the right time and there was an opportunity for him to do what he did.”

Images show the rise of Colombia’s cocaine industry in the early 1980s, a time when Escobar’s exports to the United States were earning him tens of millions of dollars a month. In 1982, Escobar’s obsession with power caused him to make the mistake that would ultimately lead to his downfall - he entered Colombian politics. Disturbed by the open influence of drug money on Colombian society, government minister Lara Bonilla attacked Escobar in congress. “The violence started at that time,” says Colombian congressman, Alberto Villamizar. “Lara Bonilla was fighting them and they killed him and until Escobar was dead it was just a war.”

The El Espectador archive shows this war - the bombs, the killings, the mayhem and the continuing fight to extradite drug dealers to the United States. Police archives show the slow victory of the authorities - one shocking image shows the corpse of Gacha, a kingpin in the Medellin Cartel, his skull blown off, one eye staring to the heavens above. Other images show the victims of the death squads who operated against Escobar and his supporters, while colour pictures of Escobar’s death in 1993 come from the personal album of Hugo Martinez, the police officer who hunted him down.

“Escobar’s story is surrounded by so much myth,” says Mollison, “so we decided to let the people speak and tell their own story.”

So we see pictures of his rise to power in the late 70s, informal snaps taken by his personal photographer, El Chino, and Mollison’s own pictures of the landscapes and people who survived Escobar’s war on Colombia.

These images provide a different perspective on Escobar and together with the interviews with those close to him - his family, his minders, his hit men - they provided a more three-dimensional view of a man who was mythologized to a point where he was America’s Top International Bogeyman - a position since occupied by Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Most interesting are El Chino’s photographs. These show Escobar the family man. One series of images shows him at his daughter’s 12th birthday party, just after Escobar had become number one on the FBI’s most wanted list. He’s on the run, but we see him dancing and drinking and presenting his daughter with a white horse. The final image shows him sitting deep in thought, a bizarre cocktail of dry ice and cordial foaming in front of him. “That is my favourite photograph of him,” says El Chino, “because in the middle of the party he is left thinking and that is him... He was not a happy man.”

We see Escobar’s country retreat, Hacienda Napoles, resplendent with its own private zoo, and the prison Escobar built for himself (and walked out of) as part of a surrender deal to avoid extradition. Rough colour shots show the sex toys found in the prison and the football pitch where Columbia’s most successful team played Escobar’s prison side. Escobar’s side won.

Mollison’s provides the images for the aftermath of Escobar’s life. There are interiors of homes built by Escobar for the poor of Medellin - their ramshackle but immaculate interiors decorated by images of Jesus, Mary and Pablo Escobar. A portrait of Escobar’s mother shows eyes that perhaps saw, heard and spoke more evil than she would have us believe, while a searing portrait of Popeye, one of Escobar’s most trusted lieutenants, shows a face that seems almost incapable of showing any remorse or pity or pain.

The artwork of German Arrubla recreates Escobar as a kitsch Jesus/Che figure, complete with camouflage robes and a bleeding heart, while the personal album of US DEA agent, Javier Pena, shows Pena ( a Borat-lookalike with crimpy hair and big tash) posing with the guns, gold and drugs seized by the police on raids on the Medellin Cartel’s properties.

Mollison was only able to research Escobar because he has become a mythic figure. “He’s become someone you can talk about because he’s the bad guy,” says Mollison. “If I had asked about the people controlling the drug trade today, that would have been different. The new guys have learnt from Escobar not to be so flamboyant, to be more low key. In Escobar’s time, if somebody got killed they would be dumped on the street. Now they get buried instead, but it’s not that different.”

Mollison’s Pablo Escobar is both a simple and a complex character. Simple, because he was essentially a gangster, complex because his violence was on such a grand, almost legendary, scale. Mollison’s text draws a picture of Escobar that acts as a primer on the politics of the drugs trade and how money, power and law influence each other both domestically and internationally. Mollison doesn’t make any solid conclusions about anything. Instead, he poses questions that remain unanswered, and lie awake in one’s mind long after one has read the engaging and accessible text. The effect is compounded by the images ( and the wide range of sources they come from) that contradict and undermine each other and add to the idea of Pablo Escobar as a myth in his own, and many other people’s making.

“He was just like any other bandit,” says Hugo Martinez, the police chief ultimately responsible for Escobar’s death. “I have always put a lot of the blame on the gringos - the agencies, the press that built him up on the world stage as a Mafioso who was very important... They fanned the flames. He thought that he was very important and started believing that he had the right to kill presidential candidates - to do anything he wanted.”

Li Zhensheng

Bringing the Revolution Home


When Li Zhensheng, now 63, began working as a photographer at the Heilongjiang Daily in 1963, his job was simple - to capture glowing images of the party, peasantry and workers of China’s most northerly province.

Then came the Cultural Revolution. Purges of “class enemies” and “capitalist roaders”, the overthrow of “counter-revolutionary” communist party leaders and internecine fighting between rival groups of Red Guards claimed millions of lives and brought the People’s Republic to the brink of collapse.

There to record it all was Li Zhensheng. Acting outside his brief of presenting only the positive side of proletarian China, he captured the violence and chaos in an archive of incredible images that constitutes arguably the most important body of Chinese photojournalism ever created.

Li’s inspiration to record history started at Changchun Film School in the early 1960s. “Wu Ying Xian, the famous Chinese photographer told me, “Photographers are not only witnesses. They are recorders as well.” It made me realise that when we record history, we have to record it completely - the negative as well as the positive,” explains Li.

As the Cultural Revolution gathered pace, negatives there were aplenty. Li recorded the desecration of a Buddhist Monastery, and the humiliation of monks, forced to stand holding a banner that reads “To hell with Buddhist Scriptures. They are full of dog farts.”

Then there is the political persecution. In one incredible sequence, Li shows Heilongjiang’s Provincial Governor, Li Fanwu, being denounced. Head bowed, and standing on a chair, his head is shaved by zealous Red Guards, their eyes full of ideological fury.

Ren Zhongyi, the provincial party secretary, is shown with his face daubed with ink and wearing a dunce’s gap. In 1966, Ren was accused of being a “Black Gang Element” and “capitalist-roader”. Surviving the traumas of over 2,000 criticism sessions, Ren became the Party Secretary of Guangdong Province in the 1980s - and can count the establishment of the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen amongst his reforming achievements.

Other photographs from the Cultural Revolution do exist, but what makes Li’s unique is they are the only ones that portray the period with such journalistic and historical integrity and purpose.

“When I took these images,” explains Li, “photographers from other newspapers just stood there. They said - “what’s the use of taking these photos - you will be criticised for wasting film” - and would only shoot the positive propaganda images.” Li, in contrast, would shoot pictures for publication, then concentrate on capturing the negative images - the violence and psychodrama of Red Guard rallies and criticism sessions.

To get better access to political events, Li noticed that “...people wearing a Red Guard armband could take photographs freely...” So Li got his rebel armband and “...whenever I wore it I could take all the photographs I wanted, and nobody ever bothered me.”

As a Red Guard, Li soon became the target of rival groups - as did his growing archive of politically suspect negatives. “Before I realised it was risky to take these photos,” he says, “I only put the negatives away so my colleagues wouldn’t see them. In 1968, when our rebel group was about to be criticised, I realised I had to do something about the negative images. I transferred all the negative images from my office to my home. Had they been found, they would have been burnt. I witnessed many negatives being burnt.”

Li’s images became even grimmer as the Cultural Revolution descended into chaos. He shows us factional fighting between rival groups and, in some powerful portraits, the resulting injuries and deaths.

Most moving are a series of images of 8 people being executed. One of the condemned is a “counterrevolutionary” technician. As he is taken to the place of execution he closes his eyes for the last time and cries out, “This world is too dark!” Then he is led away to be shot, his eyes closed tight against the world he will never see again.

Li also suffered personal tragedies. His first girlfriend left him after her father was denounced as a “dog landlord”, his father-in-law killed himself, and Li himself was criticised and spent 2 years at a “rectification” school near the Chinese-Soviet border.

But Li survived and so did his negatives - wrapped in oilskin cloth and hidden under the floorboards of his one-room home.

Normality slowly returned to China, and Li returned to the Heilongjiang Daily where he photographed Harbin’s commemoration of the death of Mao in 1976 and the celebrations that met the fall of the Gang of Four and the historic end of the Cultural Revolution.

Li’s photographs were not made public until 1988 - when 20 were shown, and won first prize, in an exhibition in Beijing. These images were so powerful that they attracted the attention of Robert Pledge, cofounder and director of Contact Press Images, who met with Li and agreed to edit and publish the book. The Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 delayed work on the book which only began in 1996.

First, the negatives had to be taken to New York. “The first time I went to New York, I didn’t dare to bring negatives for fear they would be confiscated. The next time, I carried a small amount of negatives each time, which I hid in my wife’s feminine products. After 2 times, there had been no problem, so I became bolder and carried more.”

Li carried over 30,000 negatives to New York, which were edited down to 285 featured in the book, all of which are shown uncropped and in chronological order, as a true historical record of the Cultural Revolution.

Li’s aim is for Red-Color News Soldier to be published in mainland China. “It will be published in China,” he says, “but it’s a question of time.”

It’s also a question of politics, and whether the Chinese Communist Party leadership are willing to address the tragedies of 20th century Chinese history and the role the party played in them.

If they are, then the true historical value of Li’s photography will be realised, and Li’s ultimate goal met - “I hope this book will show what happened in that period, in order that this tragedy wil never happen again.”

trent parke

Australian Passion

“I love taking pictures,” says Trent Parke, “and I love Australia. It’s the only place I want to photograph.” Parke’s dual passions have resulted in a body of work that portrays Australia in a revelatory light, a light that is as revealing of Parke’s own psyche as it is of Australia itself.

“My mum died when I was 10 and it changed everything about me,” says Parke. “It made me question everything around me.” Soon after his mother’s death, Parke began taking photographs with an old Pentax, and his questioning became visual. “Photography is a discovery of life which makes you look at things you’ve never looked at before. It’s about discovering yourself and your place in the world.”

Parke’s discovery of the world around him include The Seventh Wave ( shot by Parke and his partner, Narelle Autio), a portrayal of the insignificance of man set against the raw power of Australia’s seas. The theme of isolation and alienation is developed in his black and white exploration of Sydney, Dream/Life, a work where Parke combined extreme lighting and long exposures to create a street photography that reveals the fragile facades of any urban existence.

With Dream/Life under his belt, Parke was looking for inspiration to re-examine the state of the Australian nation. He found it when he saw an article saying that Australia had lost its innocence, that the Bali bombings, environmental disaster and a beleaguered indigenous population had made the Lucky Country not so lucky any more. This supposed loss of Australian innocence, Parke decided, would be the subject of his next project.

“I went on a giant road trip where me and Narelle travelled around for 2 years living in a 2-man tent. I’d shoot my film on the road and because I wanted to stay in that sense of being on a road trip, I’d process it on the road, hanging the negatives up to dry on a clothesline. I had a laptop, so every time we got to a caravan park I could scan the pictures in, print up little postcards and see what was happening.”

With the pictures shot, Parke made the exhibition (now showing in Australia) and is currently editing the book version. “The book is almost a fiction where I’m creating a story from these documentary pictures. It’s basically making a statement that the world’s going crazy,” says Parke. In three parts, Minutes to Midnight puts Australia on a visual journey where the nation approaches the apocalypse, meets the apocalypse and finally finds redemption and rebirth.


It is a raw work that combines the energy of street photography with Parke’s penchant for weird lighting. In one street shot from Sydney, a line of people stand across the road, small figures lit by late sunlight. They are surrounded by a strip of white light against which giant shadows rise. It’s a haunting image that is simply baffling until Parke reveals it was a three second exposure. “It is a bus going through an intersection and this is the shadow of people on this side of the intersection on the bus. But for me, it reminds me of Hiroshima where people’s shadows were burnt onto the wall.”

Next comes the post-apocalyptic aftermath. Plagues of flying foxes flit across the sky, the road kill body of a kangaroo foetus lies on the tarmac and a barren landscape of scorched tree stumps from a firestorm in Canberra are just a few of the images that spell doom Australian style. It’s a signifier of how, beyond the beach and barbie facade of the Australian Dream, a harsh and unforgiving environment beckons, a world where death and despair are, and always have been, part of the landscape.

For a reborn Australia, Parke shows a New Year Bachelor and Spinster Ball in the depths of the Outback. As New Year approaches, a water truck sprays the revellers with water to keep them cool. Another image shows flying foxes tracing a sperm-like pattern in the sky, while Parke’s images of his heavily pregnant partner coiled up like a foetus in a billabong adds an autobiographical touch to the story, as does the beautiful image of his son being born.

With Minutes To Midnight done, if not quite dusted, Parke was looking for a new challenge. “The Minutes to Midnight pictures were lyrical and timeless, but there was nothing that really identifies Australia in a physical sense, so I wanted to do something that looked at urban Australia, that used signs and advertisement that would date the country in a particular time. I wanted more detail so people can read signs. That was why I had to go up from 35 mm to medium format. At the same time, I started going through our family albums and I found all these old kodachromes and I was amazed by the colour. That was the main catalyst for going into colour.”

So Parke went from shooting black and white on a Leica to medium format colour on a Mamiya 7. As the project began, Parke’s street-shooting style became more considered. “I wanted to have this quietness, this stillness to the images. I’d have five spots in my day where I shoot from and I know that at say, 7 o’clock in the morning the light will be in a certain place and I can shoot there for ten minutes, then I move back to another spot where the light will be in a different place and I’ll shoot there. With this work, I’ll go back to a place again and again and again until something happens. I shoot a lot of pictures, up to 40 rolls a day. It costs me a fortune in film.”

One Sydney image shows a boy staring straight at the camera as he is held by his brother. Behind him his diminutive mother talks on a mobile, pram in hand, while to one side a tall man in a blue shirt talks to a woman in pink. All are bathed in a reflected light, but around them pools of black lap over other passers-by, granting them the kind of anonymity we associate with the city.

Parke’s hunger for seeing and photographing in new ways have made him Australia’s most visionary photographer, a man who has made the documentation of Australia his life’s work. Despite the creative energy, enthusiasm and passion, he remains down-to-earth, his philosophy as deceptively simple as his pictures are complex. “You shoot a lot of shit and you’re bound to come up with a few good ones.”

Jacob Aue Sobol

Second That Emotion



“When I was a child, my father gave me a book called The Diary of a Hunter. It showed Greenland and the changes that were taking place there. I finally visited Greenland when I was a student. I wanted to show the culture clash between the traditional and the modern. I went to Tiniteqilaaq, a settlement with 150 people. I had 2 rules while I was out there - no pictures of icebergs or empty beer bottles.

After 5 weeks, I got home, developed my film and realised I had only photographed the clichés of Greenland, so I went again and stayed with a priest called Hans. I went hunting with him and on one trip, I saw a seal - the rule is that if you see an animal first, you kill it. Hans gave me the gun and I shot the seal. It was the first animal I had ever killed and it changed my relationship with Greenland forever.

Then I fell in love with Sabine and started living with her and her family. Now, instead of coming home with exposed film, I wanted to come home with fish or fur. I started using my compact camera to record my emotions with Sabine. I was fascinated by the spontaneous way she expressed her joy, her fear, her sorrow and I tried to capture that in my photographs.

I stayed for 6 months then we came to Denmark to earn money. It was the first time Sabine had seen streets and trees and she got very homesick. For 2 and a half years we lived between Denmark and Greenland. On the last trip we broke up and I came back to Denmark.

I was so depressed in my flat in Copenhagen. I started looking through my photographs as a way of being with Greenland. At first I struggled, but then I realised the pictures that really hit me in the stomach were all about Sabine, and that the book had to be about her. I was in love. Sabine is a love story.

I didn’t photograph for 2 years after Sabine. Then I went to Guatemala to make a film with my brother about a girl who sees the sea for the first time. I went back to stay with this family - I wanted to get to know the people I was photographing. Photography is a kind of mirror that can show you things that aren’t visible to the eye. It can be very concrete and immediate but I tell fragments of things, and people have to look inside themselves to put those fragments together.

Now I am in Tokyo. When I started the project here I didn’t know what I was doing but now I do. In Japan you have this photographic tradition of telling personal things in diary form, and this project is part of that tradition.

In Japan there’s a clash between generations and collective and individual cultures. I photograph the collective culture from a distance and the individuals from closer. I don’t have much relationship to the people I meet. Instead I use animals to make a connection, especially the wild cats you see everywhere - they can give you a closeness you can’t get with people in that environment.

It’s about an emotion. Anders Petersen always told me to photograph with the stomach, not the mind. It’s about asking questions. I photograph daily life but it’s always an attempt to leave something for the viewer to interpret.”

Daido Moriyama - Memories of a Dog

Blurred, Dark and Grainy

by: Colin Pantall

Daido Moriyama was seven years old when America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The post-war years he grew up in were the bleakest time in Japanese history. Living amid scenes of destruction and occupied by the Americans, the Japanese people were dislocated from their past. Having effectively lost their identity, they turned inwards and dedicated themselves to the rebuilding of their country. Economically, it was a hugely successful venture. Culturally and psychologically, it was a time of darkness, depression and spiritual emptiness.

This was the environment Daido Moriyama grew up in, and the atmosphere and mood of this environment is what he photographed. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, he shot the world around him - the streets and alleyways around his Shinjuku home, the roads on which he travelled, the television which he watched. He photographed his own disturbed, inner state, and in doing so captured the troubled soul of post-war Japan.

Moriyama’s photographs from this time are some of the most distinctive images ever made. Blurred, dark and grainy, they are also completely at odds with traditional ideas of what a good photograph is supposed to be.

“Daido’s work is difficult,” says Michael Hoppen, whose Michael Hoppen contemporary Gallery represents Moriyama in the UK. “Sometimes people see it and think, ‘Why would anyone want to buy Daido’s work? It looks like he doesn’t know what he is doing. So when you see his work, you have to forget everything you know about photography. Instead you need to know something about his background and what he’s trying to do.”

“Daido Moriyama is a true visionary,” says Martin Parr. “He has a very distinctive language that he’s made his own. There are only 5 or 6 truly great photographers in the world and he’s one of them.”

Memories of a Dog (published by Nazraeli Press) is the first English translation of a collection of Moriyama’s writing from the 1980s. Printed in parallel with his photography, it is a true classic - a work of immense poetry in which Moriyama connects photography, memory, longing and despair.

“Memories of a Dog shows he is thinking about what he does,” says Michael Hoppen. “It shows us the meaning in his work and the emotional turmoil that he went through as a photographer and an artist to reach the level he has reached. He has been through some torrid times and has a dark vision of the world. Moriyama’s work is about despondency, depression and despair.”

In one chapter, Moriyama longs for the freedoms of a sentimentalised childhood spent foraging around old US bases. He visits one and writes how, “On every street corner, a sense of weariness and vulgarity pervades, like a dusty sun-bleached painting in primary colors.” The streets are deserted, the landscape is faded and filled with abandonment and despair.

Another chapter finds Moriyama seeking to escape himself through an endless cycle of travelling and shooting. He attempts to capture on film the gentle consolations of life, “...the faint white profile of a woman that grazed a corner of the windshield... the gaze of a boy standing still in a field are like images once seen on a screen that are burned vividly into my mind’s eye...,” yet, “...no matter how much I shoot most of what I want simply flows away like water spilling through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images...”

Then there are those images, those ‘fragments’ of half-forgotten memories - the darkness of the night and the emptiness of the road, seascapes that stretch out into unrelenting darkness, streets and alleyways where humanity flits, half-concealed and ghoul-like, between extremes of shadow and light.

Although Moriyama uses photography to understand himself and the world around him, he does so very much on his own terms. “In a way the camera is his divining rod,” says Hoppen. “It has it’s own energy and impetus and makes him take the photograph, rather than the other way round. His photography is, like all good photography, a search for truth.”

Moriyama’s search for truth really began in 1959 when he saw William Klein’s ground-breaking photography of New York for the first time. Freely shot in high-contrast tabloid style, Klein’s radically cropped images captured the dark energy of the city and its people.

“I learned from his photographs real experiences,” Moriyama has said of Klein’s New York. “Klein’s images, which were rough, simple and even violent at a glance, made me realise the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art.”
This openness to new and different ideas is another clue to Moriyama’s success. He cites Western influences as varied as Weegee, Warhol, Atget and Frank, as well as writers like Proust, Kerouac and Kafka, all adding up to a visual perspective that makes his work accessible on a global scale.

But Moriyama was also influenced by Japan’s greatest photographers - people like Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe. Inspired by them, he made famous images that help define post-war Japan. Look at his images of Japanese soldiers in a coffee shop, his Computer Age workers, his Tokyo Housing Development couple or his high-kicking marching band, and you are taken directly into the claustrophobic world of 1960s Japan.

But as the 1960s progressed, Moriyama looked increasingly inwards. While other photographers were shooting the Vietnam War or the transformation of Japan into an economic superpower, Moriyama became divorced from the time. Instead he engaged with the margins of society, prowling the streets for images to reproduce in Moriyama’s favoured form - the book.

“His work is designed for the book - not a magazine or gallery,” says Michael Hoppen. “In a traditional photo-essay, there is an easy-to-read narrative. Daido’s narrative is about irrationality - of life and trying to make sense of what is going on around us.”

The most irrational of Moriyama’s books are The Hunter and Bye-bye Photography - both published in 1972. Images from The Hunter in Daido Moriyama include his mournful nudes, threatening landscapes and Moriyama’s famous picture of a barefoot prostitute fleeing down a rubble-strewn alleyway.

During this time, Moriyama also worked for Provoke - a magazine whose influence far outlasted its 5 issues. “Provoke challenged the preconceptions of photography,” says Parr, “and tried to make it more about how you feel about the world, rather than how to describe the world.”

How Moriyama felt about the world was evident from Bye-bye Photography. “Daido was on the verge of giving up photography totally,” says Parr, “and then exploded with this book of scratched, blurred and dark images of posters, newspapers and televisions.”

It wasn’t well-received at the time, and many people feel that its subject matter is not really worth recording. “He makes pictures of newspapers or television and people say, ‘oh , that’s easy - it’s just a picture of a newspaper or advertisement’. But why is that any less valid or worthwhile than a picture of a field or a landscape,” says Michael Hoppen.

“The trouble is people see his work and think it’s easy. But actually it’s very hard to do, because he’s photographing things he knows in a very truthful way - a very emotional way. In terms of technique, you can see what he does, and how he does it, but that isn’t what makes a Moriyama image. There are plenty of people who try to copy him, but ultimately they fail because there is always something missing.”

More recently, Moriyama’s photography has become calmer, perhaps mirroring his more stable psychological state - he has left the depression, insomnia and addictions of the past behind him. Yet still there is that truthfulness in his work, that search for the ultimate reality. “When you see his photography,” says Martin Parr, “you know it’s his work. He can make iconography out of virtually nothing.”

But Moriyama’s iconic figures of dogs, cats, roses and hats have another element - a certain sadness, and it is Moriyama’s ability to capture the melancholy and darkness of life that really makes him unique. His camera captures a world that is becoming increasingly violent, turbulent and full of uncertainty. It is the world Moriyama grew up in and is the world we all inhabit. Perhaps that is why his pictures have such a visceral effect.

In Memories of a Dog, Moriyama remembers an anti-American riot in 1960s Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and the transformation of the innocuous and unthreatening into the dark and violent. He considers the changes since that time and writes, “The times look quiet at first glance. But I think they are actually more brutal. That dark night in Shinjuku was nothing but a trial run. And to me, as always, the coming of the night is frightening.”

Lise Sarfati

Madonna and Child


by Colin Pantall


Four years ago, Lise Sarfati was travelling across America to photograph teenagers for her New Life series. One of Sarfati’s most successful New Life subjects was Sloane, a chameleon-like teenager from Berkeley, California. Inspired by her New Life series, Sarfati returned to the United States to focus on the relationship between Sloane and her mother.

One image from the series (titled Mother and Daughter ) shows Sloane outside a suburban house. She looks down, away from the camera, her heavily made-up face further disguised by the veil of hair that surrounds her. Sloane is the daughter, but what kind of daughter is she - her face is a mask that expresses no emotion and reveals nothing except a slightly eerie suburbanised beauty. The effect is compounded by other images - Sloane in big glasses in a frilly necked red dress, Sloane by a book shelf, her face a picture of disinterest and boredom, and Sloane in her bedroom wearing the kind of dress that Loretta Lux’s otherworldly children would die for. Sloane almost struggles under the weight of wigs, cosmetics and costumes she wears.

This lack of expression and emotion is deliberate, says Sarfati. “There is little emotion because I think that people do not express their emotion anymore,” says Sarfati. “They keep their emotions locked up and sometimes they have no relationship with their physical environment. Instead they wear make up. It is like a mask. Everything is inside and they can’t communicate. Their relationship is with their complexion, with their appearance, with their clothes, with fashion.”

Clothes are also a key to the mother daughter relationship. The coat Sloane wears is borrowed from her mother, part of Sloane’s attempts to create an individuality through dress.

Sarfati reprises this obsession with clothes in her portraits of Christine, Sloane’s mother. Shot from below, Christine is photographed in a sleeveless dress, her black hair cascading over her shoulders, her heavily tattooed arms held by her side. She looks down as sun-dappled trees reach over her. In another image she wears a wedding dress, a sad-eyed bride awaiting her fate, while another shows her standing in the black dress, her hand holding her stomach in a posture of grief and regret.

Sarfati is interested in the similarity and differences mothers and daughters show. So we see Christine wearing standing in the yard wearing a dressing gown clutching a child’s bicycle, one Sloane used to ride perhaps. Is Christine mournful of the childhood that Sloane once had but has now lost, or of the child Christine herself used to be? Similarly, the image of Sloane crawling on a bed evokes something both of the physicality of childhood and also impending adulthood and a transition into the mother that she may one day become.

Gloom and doom pervades these Mother and Daughter images (the first in a series that is to be continued) but that is perhaps a reflection of Sarfati as much as it is of Christine and Sloane or American culture. “They look melancholy and depressed,” says Sarfati. “They look like me. Everybody is depressed.”

But though Sarfati believes that what she shows is brutal and a result of her control, her suggestive mix of costume, props and gaze also portray something that lies outside that control. “People think photography is reality. This is a misunderstanding. Photography is just pictures, a representation of something. Whatever you photograph, it is never what it is.”