It had been ten years since I was last in Berlin and was marveling from the top of the Reichstag’s large viewing terrace at the immense facelift the city has undergone when I heard the collective voices of hundreds chanting screeds alongside the cries of an indecipherable (Ich spreche kein Deutsch) man using a bullhorn coming from the nearby Brandenburg Gate, the border between the old East / West Berlin. Curious, I left the tourists behind me at the refurbished Reichstag and approached the Pariser Platz as the crowd’s chanting crescendoed, erupting into cheers when I passed beneath the gate’s statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory.

Not understanding what they were saying, and despite not having any clear idea what was actually happening, it was quickly clear that a great number of Palestinians, Turks, Syrians (identifiable by their flags) and others were extremely unhappy. I immediately began snapping photos and realized that I was more accepted within the surging Muslim crowd dressed in hijabs and kuffiyehs, felt more at home with the protesters, given free reign to shoot as I pleased by them than the stoic and disapproving police covered head to toe in riot gear lining the perimeter of the square.

Asking a Syrian woman boasting her birth country’s flag, I quickly got the details:

“These hundreds of people are gathered here in Pariser Platz beneath Brandenburg Gate today (Friday, June 4th 2010) to protest the Israeli raid on six ships comprising the the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla, carrying more than 600 hundred passengers. They killed nineteen people and injured hundreds. This is unacceptable. They must be stopped!”

Three Youths Hug the Pariser Platz Sign beneath Brandenburg Gate during the Gaza Protest

The attack, which occurred approximately 65 kilometers of the Gaza coast in international waters, has been condemned worldwide and has brought well-deserved attention to what some call at minimum an illegal blockade, yet one that the Likud government spokesman Mark Regev maintains “was totally within its rights under international law to intercept the ship and to take it to the port of Ashdod”. Much more than just another “incident” within controversial areas many are unwilling to wade into, the use of what the majority of the protesters deem to be unnecessarily deadly force against boatloads of international journalists and writers as well as the death of nine Turkish activists, has gotten the attention of Turkey, Israel’s biggest trading partner and up to now, most trustworthy regional ally.

Turkey, which has seemed to usurp the role of Mideast leader of late, may have the power to apply unseen pressure on their their Mediterranean neighbor, possibly more so than U.S. president Barack Obama’s so far unheeded advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lift the blockade against the Palestinians. They meet in Washington on July 6th.

None of the people here were willing to sit down at the nearby Starbucks to discus Israel’s claims to homeland security after the unilateral action by its military, which many of its own citizens condemned as overly harsh.

Just as soon as I had seen a fraction of the new Berlin (without the hundreds of cranes towering above last century’s skyline), where the multi-ethnic citizens use of freedom of speech seemed to equal or greater to anything I had ever experienced, I realized that more than just the usual protest, something massive was being stirred, an immense stand was being taken, with a greater number of countries involved than ever before, one from which we don’t emerge unaffected nor unscathed. I had a train to catch, an article to write and negatives to develop, but more than more of the same supposed unbiased reportage, I had to look deep to see that there was no clear understanding, no simple cut and dried answer, no unaffected people. The problem is growing and more and more people are becoming involved everyday, some violently, even fatally so. I have to ask myself if the answer really lies in more walls, borders and flags.

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Manny Santiago is a photographer / journalist currently circumnavigating the globe. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos

Only a few man-made structures lend themselves to automatic inclusion in science-fiction movies. Locations so out-of-this-world they have to be used as phantasmagoric shooting locations. San Diego’s Geisel Library, half the Statue of Liberty, the Bradbury Building…

On the Northern outskirts of Tokyo, the list also includes a drain. Also known by the fabricated name “G-Cans” (not an abbreviation of anything in particular), the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel however is no ordinary drain, but a series of enormous, interconnected, underground facilities. Massive holding tanks, surge suppressors, huge pump rooms, networked tunnels, control rooms, inlets, outlets, overflows, and more – all fifty meters underground.

With one hundred kilometers of flood control tunnels, the overall project was started in 1992, with the G-Cans section finishing in 2009. Designed to provide flood control for the northern reaches of the greater Tokyo metropolis, the G-Cans element alone is massive on an unimaginable scale.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F100 35mm and XP2 Super.

The two billion dollar G-Cans project is nearly six and a half kilometers long, with an interconnecting series of holding silos, varying in size up to sixty-five meters tall and over thirty meters in diameter. The largest holding tank is the massive “cathedral” – one hundred seventy-seven meters long and seventy-seven meters wide. Its roof is supported by sixty massive pillars, designed to provide both strength and low resistance to the swirling waters.

The basic design function of G-Cans is to re-channel potential flood waters from one watercourse to another, balancing and regulating the water flow to ensure flood surges and river breaches are kept to a minimum. As well as natural water flows, a turbine hall, equipped with ten megaWatt of Pratt & Whitney pumping capacity, can move over two hundred thousand liters of water per second into the adjacent Edo River. That’s enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just over one second.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium.

Construction of the main tunnels utilized a conventional Tunnel Boring Machine (“TBM”) and a two-layer lined tunnel – supporting framework and internal smooth sleeves for water flow. Ground water freezing was undertaken with large-scale expander insertions into the surrounding rock, with condensate forming on their many coupling heads, the now-removed expanders resembled alien spawning stations.

Standing meters below the previous high-water mark, with the sound of compressors and dripping water in the distance, is a remarkably surreal experience. The damp languid air adds to the feeling of potentially being swallowed up by a flooding wave as it careens through the tunnels, sweeping everything to its doom along the way. Fifty meters below the surface, fifty meters below the suburbs, with the kids playing soccer on the fields of Saitama above our heads, riding bicycles through the tunnels as we explored really added to the off-world feeling.

Since completion, the tunnels, side chambers, and main “cathedral” hall have been used in making a Tetsujin 28 film, a Range Rover commercial, numerous other TV spots, and some of the photographs here were used in the source rendering for a computer game.

While the main tunnels are now off-limits for access, the control room, above-ground infrastructure, and main cathedral are sometimes available for tours during the non-typhoon season. Bookings are available for Japanese speakers via their main website.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com or use the Contact form for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

Along with two other photographers, I am sitting in a rented car. As we sit parked on a sparsely lit dock in the south of Japan, we are watching the sun rise. Even before our arrival it feels like a unique journey; short-hop commuter flights, business hotels, a rented Honda rep-mobile, plotted routes on topographical maps, ramen dinners and konbini breakfasts.

It is 04:30, and after having driven through the early hours from Nagasaki to a remote fishing village in search of our boatman, we are ready to embark on the final leg to our ultimate destination – Hashima. An abandoned island-city, Hashima remains untouched in the nearly forty years since its 5000 or so occupants vacated by boat, taking with them only a few scant possessions.

With mining operations established in 1810, on an island less than 500 metres long, Hashima’s well known legacy includes it once being the most densely populated place on earth, housing what was Japan’s tallest building, and its first large-scale reinforced concrete apartment block. The erroneous claim of this island city being shelled by the US Navy in World War Two, ‘as it looked like a battleship’, contributes to the legend of Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, evident in the popular local nickname for Hashima.

Coming across a few fishermen, who are enjoying their last cigarette before returning home, we are gruffly told our boatman is on the other side of the dock. Approaching him within earshot of his companions, he mumbles nothing more than our departure time, and walks off. At sea, our boatman’s demeanor changes immediately to a jovial, entertaining host arranged at the behest of our sponsors, telling us stories of the sea, and of his Hashima. Forty-five minutes later, he lands us on Hashima, and three of us scramble ashore with a day’s supplies, cameras, and more film than I have ever carried.

After giving us his promise to return before sunset, our boatman maneuvers off station, leaving us alone with the silence of Hashima, awed, and not really sure of what to do next.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F3 20mm and XP2 Super.

The feeling of being in some far off post-apocalyptic land is immense. To experience a place where every way you turn is abandoned desolation, immediately overwhelms; you do not need to imagine what it would be like to stand in a once occupied city after a plague, The Bomb, or at the end of time.

Everything from the hospital, the school, factories, apartments, the bathhouse, the gymnasium, and the shrines stands vacant. Dark canyons of fallen lumber fill the streets, collapsed roofs abound, the detritus of a modern life is scattered under your feet as you walk – washed from the buildings by the wind, the rain, and the sea.

With little more to hear than a plaintive sea bird, and ominously the occasional clattering sound of falling masonry and concrete, we step over telephones, sake cups, toothbrushes, broken toys, milk bottles, and curiously, dental tools, all laying under foot as we scramble over what were once streets, and through the vacant buildings.

It is tempting to try and extract a man-against-nature message when coming to Hashima. The message here however is simply one of isolation, the feeling of vulnerability, and the opportunity to travel back in time to explore the lives of a coal mining island-city; to experience a snapshot of life in Japan from the 1960s and 1970s.

I cannot speak for my companions, but over the course of a day on Hashima as we document what we see, I go from being a photographer intent on making some serious commentary with my work, to gawking like an American tourist in Paris.

With the declining need for coal in the 1970s, Mitsubishi closed operations over a period of a few short months, ferrying the inhabitants back to the mainland with not much more than what they could carry. What they left behind in 1974, is the Hashima you see now.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium. Polaroid Type-665.

With the passing of ownership and control from the Mitsubishi Mining Corporation to the local Prefecture Office, a 220 meter public walkway has now been opened on the south end of the island. Twice-daily tours, either as a stand-alone Hashima access ticket, or as part of a regional historic pass, are now available. Hashima, as we experienced it, will most likely disappear with the expected advent of the eager day tripper.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

For more on abandoned Japan, click here.

Behind this overly paraphrased and idealized veneer of “the good life”, there exists a San Francisco Bay Area that is far more textured and heterogeneous than meets the eye, a world most easily seen from a low-speed, low-flying aircraft.

An hour in the sky reveals to the observer a past of industrial expansion and large scale infrastructure that is only superficially experienced by most of the locals on their morning commutes. Heavy industry maintains a prominent foothold in the region, a short drive away from the Bohemian pleasures of a city that lives very much within itself and its alluring distractions. The scale of nearby refineries, while notable when seen from a highway at 70 mph, is truly astounding from 2000 feet. The countless cylindrical fuel tanks, slender chimneys and intricate tubing feeding the belly of the petroleum transformation process are part of a carefully engineered machine that functions day in and day out to grease our modern economy.

The Bay Area is also home to one of the largest container ports in the Western United States, a major inter-modal container operation. According to the Port of Oakland website:

Strategically positioned adjacent to a major highway to Los Angeles, in the geographical heart of the economically vibrant Silicon Valley/San Francisco corridor, San Francisco International Airport (or SFO) remains one of the few large scale infrastructure projects intrinsically understood by the public, in terms of its relative physical footprint. As a result, SFO enjoys a correspondingly more prominent place in the public’s spatial memory, compared to the aforementioned Port of Oakland and regional oil refineries. This is in direct correlation to greater general access to the airport, as well as the ability for passengers to see its full physical extent during takeoff and landing.

Similar to the public’s understanding of the physical presence of SFO, there too is a familiarity with the scope of the region’s large scale highway and bridge systems.

Given the expanse of the body of water that is the San Francisco Bay, the resulting bridges that link the various margins are both world-famous and heavily used on a daily basis by local commuters. The Golden Gate Bridge requires no introduction, given its historical stature. The same can be said of the Bay Bridge, much beloved by the region’s residents, and more prominently located in relation to San Francisco’s urban core.

The highway infrastructure around the Bay serves a regionally significant area, and is more varied that what is at first suggested by the aforementioned iconic bridges. There are literally dozens of smaller scale bridges, viaducts, overpasses and highway junctions that overlap the area’s undulating geography. This intricately woven web of roadways becomes particularly apparent at 2000 feet, doting the observer with a broader understanding of the interconnected nature of the communities around the Bay.

San Francisco does not acknowledge its industry-heavy, automobile-prominent, petroleum-thirsty side with much relish. It leaves the notoriety of the car-city to the other major Californian Metropolis down south, to the detriment of efforts to solve its own problems of congestion and smog. In the land of banned plastic shopping bags, Critical Mass bicycle movement, “locavores”, and one of the highest household recycling rates in the US, it is easy to gloss over the prominence of the Bay Area’s industrial legacy and associated environmental challenges.

At 2000 feet certain things are more apparent.

Text and photos by Eddy Joaquim / Magnesium Photos. Cross-posted at f-stopped

Beyond the usual cliche, and outside of the normal expectation. These are the viewpoints a Magnesium photographer Skorj attempts to capture with his Polaroid camera. While Polaroid film is no longer being made, and many of these places have disappeared, their memories exist here, and in those who have seen an ordinary life…

An ancient mining town, a still-in-service 1950s’ train, an abandoned resort, a disused gas station, or a building whose occupants have long departed, they are all reduced with a common feeling of being lived in, well-used, and perhaps even loved.

If you are interested in using these in a commercial work, these photos are a small selection from a much larger body of work that is all available for licensing. Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information.

These images are available for licensing.
You may view the complete set below, or click on any image in the slideshow to get to the license page.

Architect Toyo Ito – Images by Magnesium Photos