New York, USA. July 2013.
Art at the MoMA
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Category Archives: Photography
After the Typhoon, Part II
Yokohama, Japan. September 2013.
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As is turns out, we slept through typhoon 26 in the safety of our well-engineered apartment tower. We woke in the morning to clear blue skies. On the right, a brilliant rainbow sprouted from the cloud-capped shoulder of Mt. Fuji. On the left, a daunting wall of grey rain and clouds hovered over the bay. I wasn’t sure if we had missed the typhoon or if it was just about to arrive. Before long, we learned that the worst of the storm passed through a couple of hours earlier, between 5 and 6 am, leaving only the uncommonly clear skies of an atmosphere scrubbed zealously clean. But elsewhere in Japan, Typhoon 26 caused landslides that killed at least 17 people. It is a strange and heavy thing, to sleep restfully through something others will never awake from. These are the last photos from after Typhoon 18, the ones that I took with my regular camera. The wake of the storm, the day laid to rest. |
After the Typhoon, Part I
Yokohama, Japan. September 2013.
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We are expecting a typhoon tomorrow. Typhoon Wipha, number 26. A big one. A once-in-ten-years kind of blow-down throw-down. Apparently the last time a storm of this magnitude came through, they had to pick up the front gate of our school down the street from the parking lot of the gymnasium. School has been cancelled, we bought some groceries and are battened down for the night. There was another typhoon, number 18, in September. In its wake, the particulates of industry were washed out of the air, nature’s version of high-definition clarity. The windows were covered in dried-in-place drops of salt sea-brine, and as the sun set, the colors lit up a cloud-painted sky. |
The Night Market
Chiang Mai, Thailand. February 2011.
| There is an energy about night markets that is simultaneously soothing and invigorating to me. A rush of things in suspended time. For me, this photograph captures that. Something soft, something kinetic at the same time. |
Pass Words
Barcelona, Spain. June 2011.
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I really love text. I love it because I love words and stories and poetry. I love big ideas concisely and precisely evoked through the choice of exactly the right images, the right words. But I also love text visually. I love typography and the extension of typography into art, from advertising design to graffiti. One of my favourite features of la Sagrada Familia is the set of doors you pass through as you enter the church. They are metal doors, hand-carved in Catalan with the story of Christ (at least, I think that is the story, as I don’t read Catalan), the words a perfectly imperfect texture both bold and modern, and artisanally human at the same time. |
Over Under
Yokohama, Japan. April 2012.
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This is how we go. To move in Yokohama is to go over or under; it is a city of overpasses and underpasses, of foot bridges and elevated highways and subway trains. Much of the city is built of land reclaimed from the sea, seamed together with waterways and canals under a network of pathways held up in the air by riveted pillars and boxy beams, a strangely graceful curvature of concrete and metal woven into a future as it was imagined in the industrial age. Over and under we go. |
A Moment of Orange
Bangkok, Thailand. January 2011.
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We were in Bangkok for a week recently and I intentionally left my camera at home. Sometimes when I am creating photographs, looking for them, planning them, waiting for the moment to develop, I am simultaneously plugged in to where I am and oblivious at the same time. On this trip, I wanted to practice being present, without preservation, noticing and letting the moments bloom and pass, small bright treasures as delicate in the memory as shooting stars, drifting afterward into that dreamy space between remembering and wondering whether they really happened at all. This is a photograph I took a couple of years ago. Living in Southeast Asia, one becomes accustomed to the sight of orange-clad monks. In Thailand, boys who become monks for three months guarantee their mothers’ places in heaven. And yet, as common as it is, the glimpsed brilliance of that orange is always so striking, humility boldly announced, a visual catharsis of the Bangkok heat you swim through, a flame flickering in the crowd of traversing bodies, the one true thing you almost caught in the corner of your eye that leaves you head-turned and searching. |
The Bakery Window
Kamakura, Japan. April 2011.
| One more bicycle before summer ends. I took this one a couple of years ago, meant to post it and never quite got around to it. It encapsulates something quintessentially Japan for me. It’s not a place of big supermarkets and concrete-block malls—there are big supermarkets, don’t get me wrong, but there is still very much a culture of locally owned shops and services. Instead of pulling the family SUV into the superstore lot, for the most part in Japan, you can pedal a bike to the bakery or the or the fruit seller and buy what you need put it in the handlebar basket and pedal home. In spite of the surrounding metropolis, it seems to keep life on a livable scale. |
Bicycles in Beijing, Part III
Beijing, China. April 2003.
Bicycles in Beijing, Part II
Beijing, China. April 2013.
The Puddlewonder Press 