Great Barrier Reef Photography © Matt Greenfield / Magnesium & Jon Ellis / Magnesium

The photos depicting peaceful inlets of coastal water are of Taiji, a little known whaling town on the Pacific coast of Japan’s Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture. The area is known as Kumano, and is a world heritage site, renown for its pilgrim trail and striking temples set in both ancient Cedar forests and along pristine coastline, such as this. The jagged asymmetry of the windswept trees perched on jutting outcroppings of rocks, themselves constantly battered by the sea, feels like something out of the Ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige’s well-known repertoire.

Yet every September when a group of fishermen emerge from Taiji’s sheltering coves to catch the yearly dolphin migration in order to supply the world’s aquariums and dolphinariums with fresh dolphins (at around 200,000USD a head), these picturesque waters turn from cobalt blue to blood red in a matter of hours. How? Why? It depends on who you ask.

Last October, HESO asked Louie Psihoyos founder of OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and director of The Cove. Referring to the annual slaughter of approximately 2000 dolphins in the waters of Taiji, he said Japan is “a microcosm of the oceans.

Louie Psihoyos © Manny Santiago

“I really feel,” he continued, “we only have a couple decades to turn around what’s going on in the oceans. This generation coming up and maybe the next one are going to be the only generations to be able to fix this before it’s too late, before well, just break out all the champagne and drink it because…there’s not going to be anything left for anybody else…”

Jon Ellis, diver and photographer from the Magnesium Photography Agency, commented on diving the Great Barrier Reef:

The truth is that the reef really isn’t in that good condition. Even in areas where people rarely dive there is a lot of dead coral around. It’s true that it appears to be recovering – new growth dots the outcrops of dead coral, but the predominate atmosphere is not one of vibrant health.

While it’s hard not to buy into the popular notion of having repeatedly soiled our own diapers, to the point of ruination, it’s also hard not to applaud what a dedicated few are still doing to in trying to race the clock to help stem the tide (pun intended) of the current big biological catastrophe. Can Pollution, habitat loss, overfishing, global climate change and ocean acidification be overcome?

Save coral reefs for one, which constitute less than one percent of the ocean’s space, but are home to more than 25 percent of its fish and you save humanity. Kill them and you kill us. How are we planning on saving them from bleaching—a whitening of corals that occurs when symbiotic algae living within coral tissues are expelled? Bleached coral may recover over time or simply die out altogether. The truth is, as Bill Bryson puts it in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.”

What we do know is that the seas around the country’s 20,000 miles of coastline are notoriously stingy. Enough so as to exclude them from the top fifty fishing nations, according to Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters. Magnesium Photo’s Matt Greenfield, an avid diver, recently photographed sharks around the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia—one of the only places in their coastal waters where sea-life is truly abundant.

Shark Feeding from ジーマー on Vimeo.

Finning sharks, dredging the ocean floor, selling tainted dolphin meat as whale: the animal rights argument rightfully doesn’t stop nearby Japan from scouring the world for what the Aussies—despite 9 million miles of territorial waters—have to import. Japan’s very long and extremely well protected fisheries arm—accounting for more than 15 percent of the worldwide catch—is often openly hostile, misleading and willfully ignorant toward their own customers and any such international pressure citing the human rights argument. Tsukiji Fish market in central Tokyo, the country’s seafood nerve center, is the largest in the world and is only one of many fish markets which have misrepresented dolphin and other cetacean meat selling as whale meat. Their spokespeople seem to have a preternatural gift for keeping the masses ignorant of the unsustainable truth, flouting international law and deflecting criticism from abroad.

Most Japanese people are completely unaware of this hunt – it’s the largest direct hunt of any whale, dolphin and porpoise in the world and is putting these animals at risk while producing hundreds of tonnes of toxic meat for human consumption.

Clare Perry – EIA Senior Campaigner

Meanwhile, many Japanese Fisheries apologists counter with statements like, “…in a world where we eat millions of chickens, cows and pigs, where we seem intent on plucking every salmon, cod, oyster and shrimp out of the ocean, is there something morally wrong about hunting a marine mammal like a dolphin?”

Not morally, but concerning consumer’s health, yes. Based on 1972 World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, Japan’s fisheries and Health Ministry (JMHLW) have been ignoring the self-imposed maximum contamination levels in seafood products of 0.3µg/g (parts per million – ppm) Methylmercury (MeHg) and 0.4ppm Mercury (Hg). Recently tested Dall’s porpoise samples (caught in northern Japan) being 1.02µg/g, almost three-and-a-half times the recommended limit, often more (Source: EIA-International). The giant Blue-fin Tuna, sold in sushi bars around the world as maguro, are regularly toxic as well. In fact any fish, or ocean going mammal over a certain size and age is likely a repository for dangerous levels of Mercury and any other heavy metals dumped in the ocean over the past 60 years.

Lucky then that not many are actually eating it. Certainly not the Japanese. According to the Guardian, of the 1,873 tons of whale meat processed in 2001, 70 tons went unsold. As a recent poll suggests, some 95 percent of the 1,047 respondents reportedly ate whale meat “very rarely”, had not eaten whale meat in a “long time”, or ate it “not at all”. 34.5 percent of the poll’s participants thought commercial whaling should resume, and 39.2 percent “neither agreed nor disagreed” with the idea.

One Japanese scholar with an opinion, Jun Morikawa of Rakuno Gakuen University in Sapporo, argues that whaling’s popularity—and therefore the fishing of all cetaceans—is largely a myth promulgated by certain governmental bodies and major players within the whaling industry. Though it seems that as long as 39.2 percent of the world “neither agree nor disagree” with any of this, our oceans will be in trouble.

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More can be read by downloading the Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) Poisonous Policies (EIA International, 2008)

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

Photography Curated by Sean Bonner

What is the mystery of photography? Why do we love the static image? What is it that these fragments of reality, frozen in time tell us? What is it about the photograph’s ability to transcend commonplace existence that has taken it from an unrecognized set of chemical reactions to the most popular and life-changing art-form the history of the world has ever seen?

Are we seeking knowledge of our place within the greater universal complexity? Or could it be that we are a conceited bunch of heretic animals in love with posing for and fawning over our own graven image? Is it not rather that we just love to command machines, fiddle with knobs, push brightly colored buttons and play with toys?

Ahh, toys. Ask most people when they started to fall in love with photography and many, if not most will hark back to the golden days of their childhood, when life was simpler, the sun shone brighter and film was, as the only option available, still cheap. Most photographers of today who were raised in the odd limbo generation of the 70s and 80s grew up on one or more of the futuristic Polaroid instant cameras kicking around the house. Or maybe you had the cartridge-based 110 film and disc cameras, invented by Kodak and popularized with the Kodacolor VR, or any number of short-lived point and shoot cameras, that weren’t toy cameras per se, but today can be found lining the discount bins of used camera resellers and garage sales alike, the world over.

When Fuji Camera introduced the Fujipet camera, marketed to a solely Japanese audience, this plastic camera would go on to introduce the hitherto western concept of leisure combined with the snapshot, for use by the whole family. From the instruction manual, “With the Fujipet Camera you can the pictures very easily just as you manipulate your knife and fork…The Fujipet Camera enjoys great popularity among children, mothers and all the members of the family and affords happiness in all homes.”

What about the Hong Kong novelty manufacturer Great Wall Plastic Factory, in first producing the Diana, which in turn spawned tens of hundreds of clones, that unwittingly launched the modern day toy camera revolution. They were just trying to make a fast buck. In doing so, they made history.

Thanks in large part to Mr. T.M. Lee – inventor of the Holga – is it true that anyone can be a photographer?

Despite all signs to the contrary, it was not the original goal of Mr. Lee, nor any of the other manufacturers, to make toys, but rather to ensure that people were fascinated and interested in creative film photography. As the Chinese middle class grew due to economic reform of the 80s – and with it buying power and hunger for better technology – many cheaper products, like Holga, lost ground and were nearly completely lost in the shuffle toward the new paradigm of the 90s tech boom.

As artists, amateur photographers and institutions of higher learning got in on the ground floor of the Holga Revolution, business boomed for Mr. Lee and Universal Electronic- largely in part to the Austrian-based Lomographic Society licensing and repackaging the Holga (as done with the glass-lensed Lomo LC-A – often thought of as a “toy” as well) in marketable and highly profitable kits. He was amazed at the resurgence of his twenty year-old baby, remarking it was “out of my imagination!” and smartly thought to capitalize on this newfound “Toy Camera” popularity by diversifying into a wider range of products. Add-ons for the Holga or completely new cameras (the Micro 110, 6×9/6×12 Pinhole, 3D Stereo, Twin Lens Reflex, a whole range of 135mm cameras, fish-eye lenses, color flashes, etc.) became profitable ways to expand into areas previously unimagined. The future was very bright indeed.

To ask what is the future of photography is too big for anyone to take on except in bite-size chunks. One might be well served to look back to the origins of capturing images for answers to why images- and especially those taken with shoddily-crafted plastic parts which often “leak” light, vignette uncontrollably, and capture images so randomly that the photographer would have no guarantee that any exposure will come out at all- have transfixed us deer-like in the headlights of a tsunami of cause and effect. Many of which have such wide ranging societal repercussions that we would be smart to admit no one really has any idea of what’s happening, let alone what’s on the horizon.

To extrapolate digital photography as a direct result of the Toy Camera boom, to say that Holga created the digital point and shoot in your mobile phone, to credit Hong Konger novelty and flash manufacturers with the digital paradigm as well as their own eventual decline, is not too far a stretch. What will emerge from the next few digital decades, after the Hipstamatic iPhone filter fad has worn off? A perpetual backlash against time-tested, though also time-consuming, archival methods or as Mr. Lee experienced when the unpredictable wave of economic tide turned the middle class Chinese off his product and hipsters on – a rebirth of interest in film and more importantly, sales?

Read the continued Interview with Holga Limited’s Christine So here.

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Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com if you have any questions or comments on these photos.

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.