IN 2009 Arnaud De Grave was commissioned to design a book cover for Labyrint, a Copenhagen-based publishing company translating French crime novels to Danish. Sent to Marseille to walk the path of the book’s protagonist, De Grave photographed the seamy underbelly of the dark city captured in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Kheops, a tale of “Lagavulin, jazz and beautiful girls”. Some of his results, which have hung in galleries across Denmark, are selected here.

For their next project, Caryl Férey’s Zulu, the action takes place in South Africa. A timely, but expensive location shoot for the up and coming publishing house was scrapped at De Grave’s insistence that he could recreate the macabre Johannesburg setting, where the value of human life is judged on a quid pro quo basis, simply by renting a studio and hiring a model. As one of the main characters of the novel, if not the heroine, De Grave captures the enigmatic soul of the dancer who performs her zulu war-influenced dances in smoky clubs shrouded in violence and mystery.

Zulu (Caryl Férey, 2008)

The cover shot is a close-up portrait of model Kristina Remne chosen for its austerity. Yet when the polished and reserved monochrome image on the finished cover is contrasted to the outtakes of Kristina dancing in the hellfire flash of the novel’s fiery climax, the viewer/reader begins – through De Grave’s work- to understand the clarity of the author’s vision.

Another selection of black and white imagery can be viewed at the BOP Association Gallery.

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Arnaud De Grave is a gonzo photographer / journalist currently living in Denmark. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos

There is a universal drive for gambling that I am at loss for understanding. Some people bet on horses, dogs, on anything that is able to run more or less straight in a suitably controlled environment. Ostriches, even! However, these arrangements are really elaborate random number generators. Actually each different type of betting service that exists is basically a way of crafting “exciting” random number generators. If, for example, you go to a cock fight (as in Magnesium Photographer Alan Dejecacion’s Sunday at the Cockfight), you get a binary-based random number generator. On the other side of the scale, the odds of you winning the French Lotto is seriously against you: 7 balls within a set of 49. My mind turned into goo when I tried to calculate the probabilities. I soon found out on my trip to a little known town in India that there is no stupid way to buy and sell dreams.

Waiting for the shooting to happen

Shillong lies in the province of Meghalaya in northeast India. There the local people bet on random numbers using an original and unique random number generator: one group of old men shoot arrows at a target made out of straw tied against a wooden pole, then another group of men count the arrows. The bets are made on the last two digits, i.e. if you place your bet on 42, and the shooter manages to stick 442 arrows in the target, you win. If the shooters are having a bad day or drinking too much tea and miss, you can go drown your sorrow in booze. Simple. Fascinating idea.

Being in the vicinity, I felt the urge to investigate and have a look for myself. I was very excited about trying and find out about the whole thing. Not that the prospect of seeing old men play with archery equipment is not an exciting one, but I am more into people’s reactions than in the thing which causes the reaction. After some misguided directions from random strangers, I found the spot. Indeed, the place is fairly small and easy to miss, a patch of not very well tended grass, really. When I got there people were mostly busy trying to catch glimpses of some sort of action happening in the stadium on the other side of the river, where the clamour crowd was clapping and giving hints that some sort of important sport event was developing. My guess was cricket. Cricket is huge in that part of the world.

Shooting!

I wasn’t totally blown away by what I discovered. Indeed, the action was far from frenetic. There was the preparation phase when everybody carefully laid arrows in front of him, readied their bows and smoked. Then one of the men cried something incomprehensible, and everybody started shooting. Relentlessly yet calmly, and almost without pause, they sat or crouched behind some invisible line and shot arrow after arrow. Some didn’t even blink. When they ran out of arrows, everybody gathered around the target and started removing the arrows mingling within the bundle which were not properly stuck into the target. While the judges counted and sorted them by fitting them ten by ten into what resembles a barbecue grill, the archers took care of finding back their own misdirected arrows. Though I suspect that at some point they would also go retrieve their good ones, I have to admit that I didn’t stick around long enough to witness this.

Now the sorting begins ...

All this takes place without excitement, calmly, while drinking tea and commenting on the weather. At some point, while taking pictures, I found myself in front of one of the archer. He had stopped shooting and was waiting patiently until I got out of the way. He could have offered me a cup of the aforementioned tea! Where was all the fever of gambling? Where were the shaky hands, the screaming ladies waiting for some blood to be shed, waiting for that target to eat dust? Where is the damn arrow I should have had piercing my hat, à la John Ford?

I had some tea and on my way back I climbed on top of a building under construction to see what was happening in the stadium. It was a football match, not cricket. Luckily I hadn’t bet on that…

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The major problems facing the human race are massive as ever and show no sign of abating anytime soon. Resource wars are becoming the norm. The environment needs a breath of fresh air. American obesity is getting serious (picture a muumuu-clad Homer Simpson when his fingers were too fat to dial the phone). Despite the overwhelming negativity slowing most forward-thinking legislative bodies, there seems to be a palpable worldwide trend toward cleaner living. Maybe it’s the economic recession talking or perhaps people are finally getting the idea that spending and consumption can be controlled to the gain of everyone, even those invisible third-worlders starting to demand their fair share of the world’s resources over in…wherever they are.

Smoking too appears to be declining. Even in Asia, where cigarettes are cheap- ¥300~¥350 or about €2.50 / $3.50 per pack. Yet despite all efforts to the contrary, the culture of cigarettes persists. Cigarettes have an attitude about them. Smoking is (still) cool. Smokers have a swagger. We see this in movies, on television and in advertisements that target youth. Just watch Jon Hamm’s implacable Don Draper chain-smoke at his ad agency in AMC’s historically correct Mad Men for examples of mid-1960s societal mores amid the peak of doctor-endorsed smoking and compare to now. What America was in the Madison Avenue 60s, Japan was in the opulent 80s. A commonly heard phrase of the time being, “65% of men smoke and 35% of women smoke, which means 100% of Japan smokes.”

Slowly but surely times have changed. Unless the boss says otherwise, smoking in the office is basically a no-no. The same goes for almost any enclosed indoor space, at least in California, New York, Hawaii, (despite the U.S. leading the charge against the tobacco lobby, no national legislation has been enacted, leaving the decision up to state and local governments), most of Europe and elsewhere where the government has moved to reduce health risks caused by second-hand smoke. More than two-thirds of the German population does not smoke. Less than one-third smokes regularly. Men smoke more (32% of the total sum of men smoke while only 22% of women puff). Consumption of cigarettes among youth is declining not due to smoking bans, but rather information campaigns alongside a shift in the characteristic affectations of role models.

In Denmark, the small popular bars called bodegas packed nightly with patrons would die- especially the ones with names on little brass plates in front of stools at the bar: ‘You cannot sit there, this is Lars’ chair.’- if these regulars stopped showing up to get their daily dose of booze simply because they can’t top it off with a share of nicotine.

And that is where it all goes wrong. If the bar is under forty square metres, then you can smoke inside. The sane man in all of us says, “The smaller the room the more prone it would be to become really smoky and dangerous.” But talking to the man in the street about these places was surprising. “It’s fair that smoking is prohibited, so I can bring my wife and kids without stinking afterwards,” iterated a few patrons while lighting stick after stick and discoursing on the matter. None of them was very concerned about the health of the bartender. ”Who cares about him? It’s his choice to be here…”

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

This piece has been produced with content from the following Magnesium members:
Japan by Jim O’Connell / Magnesium
Denmark by Arnaud De Grave / Magnesium
Holland by Nathalie Farigu / Magnesium
Additional photographs by:
Pete Barr-Watson / Magnesium
David Teter / Magnesium

On July 3rd in 1916, Lawrence “Chubby” Woodman, dropped a few battered clams into the fryer he normally used for French fries at his roadside stand in Essex, Massachusetts, not having any idea that almost a hundred years later, I’d be sitting here in Tokyo, craving a hot dog roll filled with his creation.

My ex-wife introduced me to clam rolls in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a short drive from her family’s summer cottage. “Ooh, clam rolls,” she said, and a short time later, we were sitting outside a shack near the water digging into a couple of them. It’s been more than fifteen years since that day, but the memory of those clams rolls has my mouth watering and stomach rumbling in anticipation of something too far away to procure.

Another legendary guilty pleasure, one that has been lost to history, was the Little Tavern “Slider,” a small hamburger that was best bought a dozen at a time. “Buy ‘em by the bag…” their signs proclaimed and yes, we did. For me, the place to grab a bag of sliders was the Little Tavern in Georgetown. In mid1980′s in the wee hours of the morning, after clubbing or before hopping to another club, we’d head up Wisconsin Avenue to the familiar little chateau-styled building clad in green and white tile. The preferred way to eat sliders was with mustard — somehow, ketchup never tasted right on them. Founded in 1927, Little Taverns were a familiar sight all over the DC / Baltimore area, with around 70 shops at their peak. But their numbers declined at the end of the century; they limped along for another decade or so, until the last Little Tavern closed in 2008.

The delights from these food emporiums aren’t the sort of meals you serve up on a first date, nor are they the sort of places you eat at every day (unless you have a very good cardiologist). They’re guilty pleasures to be savored, food shared amongst trusted friends and select initiates in a ritual of indiscretion and indulgence; saying “let’s go grab a bag of sliders” is much the same as saying “let’s be bad” with a devilish glint in your eye.

Customer samples "kaki fry" or fried oysters at a fish shop in Tokyo

Every culture has food like this. In Japan, there’s ramen, of course, considered by many to be the quintessential Japanese fast food. Ramen, while universally inexpensive, can vary widely in its quality. Avoiding mediocre ramen is key—the reward for finding a good bowl is a meal that is sublime. It’s worth the effort.

N.B.: Be forewarned that you should never mention “ramen noodles,” the plastic-wrapped staple of college kids in discussions of “ramen” (occasionally Romanized as “lamen”) as you will be branded a fool. As the Oshima Ramen chain of shops proclaim, “Ramen is a gift from God.” They may be saying that with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but it’s best to play it safe and just agree.

If you see a line of more than a couple of people waiting to get in to a ramen shop in Tokyo, you might as well cancel your plans and join the queue, because it’s likely to be an amazing experience. “Ramen Jiro” in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho district is a place like this, where for under ten dollars, you get a legendarily huge bowl, but true ramen connoisseurs will scoff, saying that Ramen Jiro’s main appeal is the immense size of the portions, not the quality of the ramen. Listing the top ramen-ya (ramen shops) here would likely invite an un-winnable battle of opinions, so I’ll refrain from trying, but they’re easy to find—either look for the queue, or ask a trusted friend.

Then there’s Okonomiyaki, a kind of savory pancake, rich with varied ingredients and topped with seaweed flakes, dried bonito, Kewpie mayonnaise and/or a thick brown sweet sauce akin to A1 steak sauce. Monjyayaki is a thinner variant, said to originate not far from Tsukiji’s famous fish market, best had in the little shops of Tsukushima, where each table is equipped with a griddle from which it’s directly eaten with little metal scrapers.

Takoyaki is a similar batter, but made into spheres on a special griddle, each with a piece or two of tough octopus meat. It’s best had when bought at a roadside stand or summer festival, especially when prepared by the sort of guy you would not want to meet in a dark alley. “The secret ingredient to good takoyaki is fear,” a friend is fond of saying.

To be honest, though, it’s hard to feel the same level of guilt eating this sort of food in Japan, as on the whole, the dishes are fresh, the ingredients are the same as you might buy for your own kitchen and, well, it’s Japanese and as a people, they just seem so healthy. Not so in other places:

First of all I’d like to state that, as a French man, there is no such thing as junk food in my diet (at least that I’d confess if no torture is involved). There is plenty of junk food to be found in the streets of Copenhagen; as everywhere else in the world we get our share of McDonald and that sort of things. In certain areas of the city the shawarma is ruling as the King of Junk, in other places it is called kebab but it is basically the same thing. And there is the pølsevogn (literally “sausage wagon”) which is the local version of the hot-dog stand so dear to the heart of new-yorkers. A complete sociological study would be necessary to understand that thing, what with old guys blocking traffic while going from wherever those mighty beasts sleep to the spot where they’ll deliver the greasy goods to customers of all ages… And the fact that they sell French hot-dog is not enough to have me try it!

A customer gluttonying down a sausage at a pølsevogn in the deep winter of Copenhagen...

So I don’t like, let alone love, junk food. So why then contribute?
Because there is that thing called smørrebrød which has a weird status around here. One can find smørrebrød in many variations but also in many caste, matter of speaking. There are smørrebrød of the junk kind, of the home made kind (of course) and of the gourmet kind, found in restaurants. Many Danes eat smørrebrød everyday for lunch, either they bring it in a little lunch box or they buy it from a smørrebrød-to-go shop. It is a common sight to see people in the streets with white little boxes around lunchtime. Although, it beats me how they can eat them properly as it becomes quite rapidly a mess as there is nothing to top them. The exact same concept can be found in restaurants, specialized restaurants of high standards. And that is why I found it fascinating, it would be like having three stars restaurants making hot-dogs.

Lunch box, the Danish style.

Technically it is an “open-ended sandwich”, meaning a sandwich with only one piece of bread. Smøre means butter, brod means bread. So that’s what you get, bread of the dark/black kind (more a compaction of cereals if you ask me), butter and then stuff on top, a lot of stuff. You have from one up to three items piled up on top of that ridiculously small piece of bread. Usually one major and two minors. Major can be fried fish, liver paste, ham, eggs, etc. Minor is usually some kind of vegetable in various state of conditioning: coleslaw salad, beetroot, cucumber, you name it… Then a sauce of some sort: mayonnaise, etc. and sometimes an additional topping: fried bacon, crumbles of bread, fried onions, shrimps and what have you. I have always suspected that a very strict code was ruling this as a state affair, the Danes being quite close to traditionalists. Surely one cannot mix some of the major with some of the minors as one pleases. I remember the first time I went to the cantina of the university where I work. One cantina was for everybody (mainly students) and the other one was for staff. In the first one smørebrod were aligned and prepared beforehand for one to shovel in one’s plate whereas in the latter one had to make them oneself being presented with a buffet of many ingredients. For at least one year I didn’t dare doing it, picturing myself trying to go through the cashier toll. I was sweating profusely imagining the girl in the white outfit looking at me sadly and doing a shy negative sign of the head, sending me back to the buffet for the choice of a bad combination of ingredients.

Smørrebrød(s) lined up and ready to be consumed.

A regular customer shovelling his prey to his plate at lunch break.

But all in all, at the end of it, what they do love here is their café cold-feet as they say: the dreaded “pølsevogn”…

(by Nathalie Farigu / Magnesium)

Snacking is not a modern phenomenon. As a matter of fact, for centuries people have satisfied their cravings for sugar, fat and cholesterol with little in between meals. When the snack attack struck the ancient Romans, they would rush to the thermopolium, which was a little shop selling warm wine and the ancient equivalent of what we now know as fast food. And apparently, the author Pliny was a big fan of eggs marinated in vinegar, which were subsequently deep fried. Other Roman snacks included boiled eggs with pine nut sauce, and libum, a sweet cheesecake.

Those dishes seem to require an awful lot of preparation. Luckily,  the Dutch alternative only requires a Euro or two and a visit to the automatiek, a special kind of vending machine. An almost exclusively Dutch phenomenon, it’s made up of rows of little heated boxes designed to keep the delicacies warm. Behind little glass doors you’ll find enough fat and cholesterol to eat your heart out, literally. Word is that the automatiek originated in Germany at the beginning of  the 20th century. However, its popularity waned after the sixties and the automatiek disappeared everywhere but the Netherlands, where it remains popular til this day.

One of the most popular items you’ll find at the automatiek is the kroket, which is a meat (mostly beef) ragout covered in breadcrumbs, then deep fried beyond recognition. Though it might not win any prizes for looks, it sure does for taste. Especially on a cold winter day, it’s very comforting to bite into a freshly deep fried kroket, perfectly crunchy on the outside, hot, gooey and salty on the inside. It’s the perfect snack in between meals, or after a night of debauchery and libations on the town.

When asked what food they’d miss the most while abroad, the majority of the Dutch population will tell you it’s the kroket. Luckily, the Dutch kroket has found its way onto a few menus of restaurants abroad as well. I found, and consequently enjoyed a kroket in places such as Lovina, Bali and Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. You just don’t get to pull it from the ‘muur’ (Dutch word for ‘wall’).

The kroket isn’t exactly a Dutch invention. It originated in France and can be found in many countries all over the world with a filling of cheese, shrimp, potatoes and/or vegetables. However, the beef kroket is a typically Dutch snack.

Most automatieken are not stand-alone walls of greasy goodness, there’s usually a counter available where you can order drinks and French fries called ‘patat’, which are often served with mayonnaise (‘patat met’). Other popular choices are ‘patat speciaal’ which are fries served with mayo, ketchup and raw onions, or the extremely delicious ‘patatje oorlog’ (war-style French fries) which will make your cholesterol levels soar beyond your wildest dreams and your fat cells scream with orgasmic delight, with its serving of mayo and fatty peanut sauce.

So, what kind of people commit these dietary crimes? According to a recent survey 75% of the Dutch population admits to eating a kroket every once in a while. I bet the other 25% hasn’t come out of the kroket closet yet.

I know that I, as a ‘vegetarian’, whenever I’m in Holland enjoy a ‘vette bek’ (which translates into ‘a greasy mouth’) on a regular basis. As my sister said: ‘It’s oh so bad, but so so good.’

I was sent to Marseille, south of France, to follow the path of Fabio Montale and make a cover for a book. A starting publishing company called Labyrint wanted to have a “film noir” oriented cover for their very first publication, Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Kheops – a dark and moody crime novel taking place there, in Marseille, now part of the legend of the city. I spent three days going to all the places described in the book, talking to old people who knew the – now deceased – author while putting my nose and my lenses into places better left alone during the day and night not really fit for tourism.

This gallery is better browsed while listening to John Coltrane’s most intense work or the (in)famous local Hip-hop band “I Am”, especially the album L’école du micro d’argent.

Arnaud De Grave is a gonzo photographer / journalist currently living in Denmark. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos