Aiming to Impress

So, this week's assignment is to compare and contrast two photographers that at first glance may seem to have very little in common - Annie Leibovitz and James Nachtwey.

Annie Leibovitz is considered by some the most famous celebrity photographer in America, perhaps the world, and it is difficult to argue with that when she was the one chosen to shoot the Obama family portrait last fall, as well as the Queen of Britain in 2007, not to mention every celebrity known to (Western) man and woman. As we could see in the PBS documentary about her, Annie Liebovitz: Life through a Lens, she is well-known for her work for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair and foremost for her many "iconic" - that word appears all the time when you read about her - portraits of various celebrities. She often uses elaborate sets or clothes or ploy ideas for her arranged pieces, although those are not the only types of pictures she takes, and I am in no way doing justice to her here. She is considered to be a great portrait photographer and there's no denying that her photos have had a huge impact on popular culture in the Western world. She's been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress, for chrissake!


(Nicole Kidman. Picture borrowed from www.pbs.org, 2010-03-15)


(Martina Navratilova. Picture borrowed from www.pbs.org, 2010-03-23)

James Nachtwey takes photographs of a radically different kind. He is by some considered the greatest war photographer around, moving from one crisis to another with his camera. He has won a number of awards for his work, including Magazine Photographer of the Year in the US a number of times. The documentary we watched about him, War Photographer, begins with a quote by legendary war photographer Robert Capa that clearly is meant to sum up Nachtwey's attitude: "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."


(West Bank 2000, Palestinians fighting the Israeli Army. Picture borrowed from www.jamesnachtwey.com, 2010-03-15)

Yet, after viewing many of Nachtwey's pictures, it appears to me that there is a strong aesthetic side to them as well. In many cases, they are beautiful pictures in themselves, even though the subject matter is painful and violent. Just look at the colors in the West Bank picture above - the scarf and the flames against the smoky blue sky, the dirt and the white wall, the shadows stretching long and the young man's matching clothes. Leibovitz could not have posed it more strikingly however hard she tried, with her set designers and camera loaders.

Or see the picture below and compare it to the picture of Nicole Kidman. Isn't there a certain kinship between them, a shared eye perhaps?


(Afghanistan, 1996. Mourning a brother killed by a Taliban rocket. Picture borrowed from www.jamesnachtwey.com, 2010-03-15)

Perhaps, as a photographer, you can't help watching the world in picture frames? Perhaps you cannot stop looking for the beautiful shot even if, like James Nachtwey, you are working in the midst of chaos and misery?

This, for me, doesn't lessen the effect of Nachtwey's pictures, I much prefer them to Liebovitz', probably because there to me is something real behind them. I think Annie Leibovitz sums it up very well herself in Life through a Lens, when talking about her short stint as a war photographer in Sarajevo:

"After that, what side Barbra Streisand needed to be photographed from didn't seem so important."

A Pleasant Encounter in Kyobashi

One of many things that I can't seem to stop taking pictures of here in Japan is old signs. Preferably rusty, and preferably still in use. On a recent walk through the seedier parts of Kyobashi, a neighbourhood not very far from Osaka Castle in Osaka (see map [pdf]), I came upon a nice one and started taking pictures.



I soon noticed a man who seemed to be interested in what I was doing - slowing down, passing by, looking back, eventually turning around at the next crossing to head back my way. When I was done taking pictures, he came up and asked "Are you German?", in an accented but understandable version of the language of Goethe. My German isn't very good, so I explained in Japanese that I'm not but that I come from a neighbouring country, and we started talking.

It turns out that Okada-san has been to Germany five times and even spent an extended period there as a foreign student a long time ago. His major was Philosophy of Law (or jurisprudence) and according to him, if that's your specialization, then Germany is the place to be. I take it that going there must have been a dream come true for him as a young student, visiting places like Heidelberg or Thübingen, famous old university towns that he mentioned with a smile.

When he came back to Japan, Okada-san got a job at a big insurance company teaching law to doctors, and from what I gather, he remained there until he retired. He indicated that he is well over seventy years old by now, but he was very 元気 ("genki", vigorous) for his age. It seems that these days he too likes to walk around with his camera, and he first noticed me because I was taking pictures of weird stuff, like dirty pipes and worn-down signs. So I told him about my passion for unintentional patterns and rusty old things and he laughed and called me 変な男 ("hen na otoko", strange man). We had a great time.

Okada-san's passion is photographing people, so he asked if he could take a picture of me. He lined me up so that the deep shadows under the raised railway tracks and the sunlit side of a building formed a black-and-white background, two separate halves joining neatly behind my head. The picture turned out pretty nice. I should have asked for a copy.

Naturally, I jumped at the chance to get the portrait assignment done, and asked Okada-san to move over to a wall nearby with some interesting pipes. Well, interesting to me anyway. I figured that the uniform colour of the background would lessen the chaotic effect of the pattern.





I quickly took three pictures and would have liked to take more, but I didn't want to impose. Still, I think they turned out okay. I feel like Okada-san's personality shines through in his gestures, his face, the tinted glasses, the pointy beard and the brightly-coloured headphones.

All in all, this little meeting was probably the highlight of the day, even though that part of Kyobashi has many interesting features to point your camera at, not least if you're into signs and debauchery. The usual cheap restaurants and pachinko halls are interspersed with suggestive-looking places with names like Crazy Horse and Honey Dipp's, places that advertise themselves with light signs telling you that 30 minutes of some unspecified activity will set you back 3 000 to 7 000 yen. Walk under the tracks, turn right onto an angled smaller street and there are several rather flashy but seemingly cheap love hotels too.

The place is well worth its own post when I get the time. For now, for more on Kyobashi, here's a nice photostream by jam343 at flickr.

Oh, and for an example of a rusty sign that I would definitely have gone gaga over, see kotoi's post on tips for foreigners, and this well-worn 銭湯 sign ("sento", public bath). Still in use too, it seems.